Once again, calls for early elections underline the faultlines that divide Turkish society, Gareth Jenkins reports from Istanbul The Turkish military and the country's Constitutional Court combined forces last week to press the government into calling early elections after preventing the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (JDP) from appointing Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as the country's next president. Under Turkish law, the president is chosen by parliament. The successful candidate must secure a two-thirds majority of the 550 members of parliament in the first two rounds of voting, or else a simple majority if the voting goes to a third round. In the first round of voting on Friday, Gul received 357 votes, ten short of the two thirds required. Nobody had any doubts that he would secure the necessary 276 votes in the third round. The opposition Republican People's Party (RPP) refused to participate in the vote and immediately applied to the Constitutional Court to have it annulled, arguing that the constitution required a quorum of two thirds of the MPs to be in parliament at the time of the vote. Few constitutional experts accept the RPP's objection, and the dispute took on an entirely different complexion late on Friday night, when the staunchly secularist Turkish General Staff (TGS) posted a statement on its website, warning the JDP that it would use the powers invested in it by law to protect the principle of secularism as enshrined in the Turkish constitution. No one with any knowledge of recent Turkish history could have had any doubt about the nature of the threat contained in the statement. When the military staged a full-blooded coup in September 1980 it cited Article 35 of the armed forces internal services law, which mandates it to "preserve and protect the Turkish homeland and the Turkish republic as defined in the constitution". It was the threat of a repeat of the 1980 coup which led to the toppling of the Islamist-led government in 1997. On Sunday, nearly one million secularist Turks gathered in the centre of Istanbul to protest against Gul's candidacy, painting the streets red as they waved flags and chanted anti-government slogans in the largest mass protest in Turkish history. Two days later, on Tuesday evening, the Constitutional Court announced that it was annulling Friday's parliamentary vote. Shortly after 11pm the same evening Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan held an impromptu press conference to announce that the government would call early elections, probably in late June or early July. Privately, sources close to Gul say he was a reluctant candidate. Although the Turkish president has almost no executive power, the incumbent President Ahmet Necdet Sezer has several times vetoed laws passed by the JDP and blocked the appointment of several hundred party supporters to key positions in the bureaucracy. Sezer's seven-year term in office expires later this month. There had been speculation that Erdogan would put himself forward as Sezer's successor, a prospect that alarmed Turkish secularists, partly because it would give the JDP almost total control over the government apparatus, and partly because Erdogan's wife wears a headscarf. Secularist Turks regard having a head-scarfed first lady in the presidential palace as a violation of the secular state. In recent months the Turkish military has repeatedly warned Erdogan against having himself appointed president. In late April, it appeared that he had finally heeded these private warnings. Until the beginning of last week he was widely expected to name Defence Minister Vecdi Gonul, a member of the more moderate wing of the party whose wife does not cover her head, as the JDP's candidate for president. Then Parliamentary Speaker Bulent Arinc, a leading figure among the 100 or so hard-line Islamist JDP MPs, threatened to put himself forward as a candidate, unless Erdogan chose someone who more closely represented the views of the party as a whole. In what now appears to have been a serious miscalculation, Erdogan opted for Gul, whose wife not only wears a headscarf but once took the Turkish state to the European Court of Human Rights over the current ban on women covering their heads in state institutions, including universities. On Saturday, the JDP raised tensions still higher by condemning the statement posted on the TGS's website and warning the TGS that it was the military which was under civilian authority, not vice versa. Many of the demonstrators who took to the streets of Istanbul on Sunday carried placards opposing both Gul's presidency and a military coup. But there is little doubt that, if forced to choose between the two, many would prefer the military. "I just hope that the authorities in Ankara are listening," said Selma, 39, a financial consultant. "I don't want the army all over us again, but I want these Islamists even less." But the JDP still commands huge support in the country. With early elections now looking inevitable, pundits predict that the JDP will once again emerge as the largest party in parliament. The only question is whether it will retain an overall majority. The crisis has once again highlighted the faultlines that continue to run through Turkish society. "I just don't want to live in a country where half the people hate the other half," said Abdullah, a 41-year-old taxi driver. "My wife wears a headscarf. So does my mother. But other women choose not to. That's their decision. What's the problem? Why can't we just live together? I'm so fed up that I've applied to emigrate to New Zealand. Somebody told me that there are more sheep there than people. I'm sure that the sheep have got more brains than a lot of people here."
