Turkey Presidential troubles, again

Aug 16th 2007 | ANKARA
From The Economist print edition
This time round, Abdullah Gul will surely become Turkey's president—to the annoyance of the army and the secular establishment

THERE was an ineluctable sense of déjà vu this week when Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, declared his intention to stand for president. When Mr Gul, a former Islamist, was first nominated for the post by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party in April, a political crisis ensued. The army threatened to intervene because of serious risks to Turkey's secular republic. Days later, the constitutional court upheld a case brought by Deniz Baykal, leader of the secular Republican People's Party (CHP), arguing that a first round of parliamentary voting to elect the president was invalid because of the lack of a quorum. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister and AK Party leader, was forced to withdraw Mr Gul's candidacy and call an early election on July 22nd, ahead of the scheduled date of November 4th.

In the event AK won almost 47% of the vote, a big jump from the 34% that first took it to single-party rule in 2002. This was a crushing defeat for the generals, who refuse to believe Mr Erdogan's repeated assertions that he and his party no longer mix politics with Islam. Magnanimous in victory, Mr Erdogan was swift to assure Turkey's shell-shocked secular elite that he was sensitive to their concerns. He even pledged to seek consensus when nominating a new president. Many took this to mean that he would choose an AK man with a tamer Islamist past—and one whose wife, unlike Hayrunnisa Gul, does not wear the Islamic-style headscarf, which is banned in all government buildings and schools.

For the army and its backers, the headscarf is an unequivocal symbol of Islamic militancy. To them, a veiled first lady would not only spell the end of Ataturk's cherished republic but also seal the ascendancy of a new, pious bourgeoisie from Turkey's Anatolian hinterland. The army also frets that a President Gul might approve several AK laws that were rejected as unconstitutional by the incumbent, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a fiercely secular judge. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Mr Gul would also have a big say in military and other appointments.

Wary of provoking a fresh confrontation with the generals, Mr Erdogan has tried since the election to douse Mr Gul's presidential ambitions—but he has failed. The question, given his unrivalled authority over AK and his big election win, is why. The other question is how the generals, who have dislodged four elected governments since 1960, will react.

The answer to the first question is now becoming clearer. As Mr Gul himself keeps pointing out, in handing the AK such a big mandate voters were also endorsing his presidential candidacy. Indeed, “Gul for president” was a common refrain at election rallies. The AK has a moral obligation to stand by him, the Gul camp insists.

Several AK bigwigs, notably a former parliamentary speaker, Bulent Arinc, who supported Mr Gul's earlier bid, duly did so again. More important, Devlet Bahceli, leader of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which won 71 seats, said his party would take part in a first round of balloting, giving the AK its prized quorum. With 20 Kurdish nationalist members also pledging to show up, Mr Gul is set to become president, if not in the first or second rounds of balloting, which require a two-thirds majority, then in a third round in late August, when a simple majority will be sufficient.

Few doubt that the affable Mr Gul will make a good president. Unlike the reclusive Mr Sezer, Mr Gul is a sophisticated man who speaks fluent English and has lived abroad. As foreign minister, he was the driving force behind the sweeping reforms that prodded European Union leaders into opening membership talks with Turkey in 2005. Even as he has reached out to Turkey's Arab neighbours and to Iran, Mr Gul has worked hard to restore a friendship with America that was bruised by the Iraq war. “Condi [Rice] likes him and trusts him,” says a senior American official.

Mr Gul also promises that defending secularism will be one of his “basic principles”. He has even hinted at a concession: his wife might soon knot the silk scarf that she winds tightly around her head and neck in a hipper style. Atil Kutoglu, a Vienna-based Turkish fashion designer, has been asked to come up with ideas.

If Turkey is really going Islamic, Mr Gul's supporters wonder, why did Saadet, the only overtly Islamist party, scrape a measly 2% of the vote? Nowadays, the Islamic intelligentsia seems less preoccupied with the veil than with whether it is appropriate for pious female Muslims to wear G-string knickers—because, as one luminary has opined, “they keep women in a permanent state of sexual arousal.”

None of this is likely to impress the generals, who say their views on the presidency remain unchanged. Yet “short of an outright coup there is little they can do [to stop Gul],” observes Soli Ozel, a political scientist at Istanbul's Bilgi University. Mehmet Ali Kislali, one of the rare Turkish journalists with good connections in the general staff, disagrees. “They have other means to make their weight felt,” he has argued in Radikal, a liberal daily. They could boycott presidential functions, as Mr Baykal's CHP has vowed to do. They could scale down their presence in the presidential palace. More drastically still, they could galvanise the courts into launching a case to close down the AK.

Zafer Uskul, a constitutional lawyer (and one of 150 new deputies recruited by Mr Erdogan to replace more militant party members) may have provided them with ammunition. He has opined that Kemalism (Ataturk's ideology) needs to be “expunged” from a new constitution being drafted by AK to replace the one produced by the generals after their most recent direct coup in 1980. This provoked uproar, and Mr Uskul swiftly declared that his words had been “misunderstood”.

Most commentators concur that, given the scale of AK's victory, the courts cannot touch it without leaving their own credibility in tatters. For the same reason it is hard to see the army stepping in directly. So a more likely outcome is that the generals will be forced to lick their wounds and take Mr Gul on his merits. His record suggests they have nothing to fear—if, that is, they truly believe in democracy.