Becoming president is the easy part -- the real difficulties still lie ahead, says Gareth Jenkins Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul looks set to be appointed as president of Turkey on 28 August, less than four months after his previous attempt triggered an intervention from the Turkish military and forced the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (JDP) to call an early election. Gul formally submitted his candidacy on 14 August, a little over three weeks after the JDP was returned to power with 46.6 per cent of the popular vote. Under Turkish law the president is elected by parliament. The candidate requires the support of two-thirds of the 550 MPs in the unicameral assembly in the first two rounds of voting, falling to a simple majority in subsequent rounds. In April this year, Gul was forced to abandon a previous attempt to stand for the presidency after a strongly worded warning by the Turkish military prompted the country's Constitutional Court to invoke a hitherto unknown law that at least two-thirds of the parliamentary deputies had to attend each presidential vote. With the opposition boycotting parliament, the JDP had no choice but to call an early election. However, it is unlikely to face similar problems this time. It only has 341 seats in parliament but the opposition Nationalist Action Party (NAP), which has 70 seats, has already announced that it will participate in each round of the voting. In the first round on Monday, Gul won 341 votes, ahead of Sabahattin Cakmakoglu of the NAP with 70 and Tayfun Icli of the Democratic Left Party (DLP) with 13. A similar result is expected in the second round on Friday, leaving Gul to be formally elected in the third round on 28 August when he will need just 276 votes. With the vote in parliament apparently a foregone conclusion, attention has now turned to the Turkish military. The incumbent president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, frequently used his presidential veto to block laws passed by the JDP and refused to appoint several hundred of the party's nominees to positions in the government bureaucracy. Many in the military suspect that Gul harbours a long-term radical Islamist agenda and that, once appointed president, he will allow the JDP government to chip away at the principle of secularism enshrined in the Turkish constitution. In addition, Gul's wife covers her head. Most Turkish secularists are appalled at the prospect of Turkey having a headscarfed first lady. Last week, Gul tried to allay their concerns by holding a press conference to express his commitment to upholding the Turkish constitution. He promised that, if he was elected president, he would put aside his sympathies for the JDP and be equidistant from all parties and strains of opinion. Few are convinced, perhaps least of all those in the JDP who have been lobbying so hard for Gul's candidacy. But support within the JDP was far from unanimous. It is an open secret that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan would have preferred Gul to withdraw his candidacy in favour of a less controversial figure. Erdogan apparently feared that Gul's appointment as president would increase tensions and make the job of governing even more difficult at a time when Turkey is facing a host of problems, from a cooling economy to its increasingly frayed relations with the EU to the perennially unresolved Kurdish issue. Yet Gul was insistent. Rather than risk a public display of disunity, Erdogan backed down and publicly endorsed Gul's candidacy. But Erdogan's reluctance to be more assertive has come at a price. In the aftermath of the last month's election victory Erdogan publicly reached out to those who had not voted for the JDP, promising consultation and conciliation. But on the most controversial issue facing the new government, he ignored all but his own party and eventually endorsed the most divisive candidate. In the process Erdogan has probably destroyed what little faith secularists previously had in his sincerity. Gul's supporters in the JDP maintain that, with the JDP still fresh from its election triumph, the military will not dare to stage a coup and that, once Gul is appointed president, the secularists will simply get used to the idea. But the evidence suggests that it is a dangerously naïve miscalculation. So far the Turkish military has been circumspect and avoided commenting directly on Gul's candidacy. Nevertheless, when asked by journalists last Thursday whether the military would be prepared to relax the ban on the wearing of the headscarf in its facilities if Gul became president, the chief of staff Gen. Yasar Buykanit pointedly replied: "We don't want to argue with anyone. But we have our rules and our principles and we shall apply them." Although an outright coup remains unlikely, neither is the Turkish military likely merely to shrug and accept Gul as president. At the very least, the JDP can now expect a long campaign of attrition. Last week, President Sezer served notice of the secularist establishment's intentions by publicly humiliating Erdogan. On Thursday, following over a week of preparation, Erdogan arrived at the presidential palace to present Sezer with the list of the new members of his government for presidential ratification. Sezer refused to accept it, leaving a tense and bewildered Erdogan to try to explain what had happened to the television crews waiting outside the presidential palace. Although Gul is still expected to be elected on 28 August, the JDP may yet find that appointing him as president was the easy part; the difficulties will come afterwards.
