ANKARA - Turkey's new president should be wholeheartedly committed to the secular order in the mainly Muslim country, army chief Yasar Buyukanit said Thursday in his first comments on upcoming presidential elections.
"We want to underline our hope that the parliament will elect a president who adheres in earnest, and not just in words, to the basic principles of the republic and the ideal of a secular, democratic state," Buyukanit told a rare press conference here.
Asked whether he had doubt that someone not meeting this description could get the post, Buyukanit said "No," and refused to answer further questions.
His remarks came amid a mounting debate on whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former Islamist, will run in next month's elections, a prospect that has sparked objections by secularists and raised tensions in Ankara.
Erdogan says he has disowned his Islamist past and now describes himself as a "conservative democrat", but the secular elite suspects he still has a secret Islamist agenda.
The Turkish army sees itself as the self-appointed guardians of the secular system and, in 1997, forced the resignation of the country's first Islamist-led government.
The president is elected for a single seven-year term by the 550-member parliament, where Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) -- born out of a now defunct Islamist party -- holds a two-thirds majority that will allow it to easily elect the candidate of its choice.
The main opposition center-left Republican People's Party describes the presidency as the "last stronghold" of secularism and accuses the AKP of seeking to seize it to advance its Islamist ambitions.
The influential military, the academic elite and the judiciary are also mistrustful of the AKP.
The election, which can run to four rounds, should be completed on May 15 at the latest, but a detailed timetable has yet to be fixed. Parliament will begin collecting candidacy applications on April 16.
No party has so far announced a candidate.
Pro-secular civic groups have called a rally in Ankara next Saturday to protest against Erdogan's purported intention to succeed President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a staunch secularist who has often clashed with the government.
Along with largely ceremonial duties, the president has a one-time right to reject bills passed by parliament and the final word on appointing senior government officials.
Sezer, a former senior judge, has often sent back to parliament laws he considered breaches of secularism and blocked the appointment of officials he saw as Islamist government cronies.
04/12/2007 13:56 GMT