ANKARA - Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul geared up Monday for his election as president, but Turks remain deeply divided over the future of their secular system with a former Islamist as head of state.
The 340 lawmakers of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), the dominant force in the 550-seat parliament, should easily secure Gul's victory when the house votes in a third presidential ballot on Tuesday.
The vote requires only a simple 276 majority, unlike the first two rounds when the support of two-thirds of the parliament was required.
Gul's election would mark the AKP's capture of all the high offices of state in an unprecedented victory over secularist forces, who argue that the party, the moderate offshoot of a now-banned Islamist movement, is seeking to erode the separation of state and religion.
Others dismiss such concerns as "fear-mongering" by political rivals who have failed to match the AKP's rising popularity.
They see Gul's presidency as the ultimate triumph of democracy in a country, where the conservative and impoverished masses that form the AKP support base long been kept on the political margins by an army-backed secularist elite.
"The genie is out of the bottle in Turkey and this process towards a wider and 'civilian' democracy... is just unavoidable," columnist Yusuf Kanli wrote in the English-language Turkish Daily News.
The democratisation process is advancing "at the expense of the civilian and military bureaucracy," he said, while warning of "a catastrophe if the pace is not properly adjusted."
Gul's first bid to become president in April triggered a political crisis and a warning by the influential army, which has unseated four governments in as many decades, that it stood ready to defend the secular system.
In response, the AKP called an early general election and won a landslide victory, which it saw as a popular mandate to re-nominate Gul.
The AKP has disowned its Islamist roots and conducted far-reaching economic and democratic reforms which have met with strong public approval.
An opinion poll published Monday suggested that the overwhelming majority of Turks -- 76.6 percent -- decided their vote in the July 22 polls on the basis of economic expectations and only 11.3 percent said that fears over the secular system were among their top two concerns.
Gul, 56, has repeatedly pledged loyalty to the secular system if elected, but skeptics remain unconvinced.
"Parliament will elect a president who is not like previous presidents," the pro-secular Cumhuriyet daily wrote, pointing at Gul's Islamist past and the fact that his wife wears the Islamic headscarf.
"Gul... will remain under suspicion as long as he fails to openly make a self-criticism about his past attitudes," it said.
His election would be "an investment in tensions rather than in peace and confidence," it added.
Gil is expected to be sworn in immediately after Tuesday's vote.
Turkey's president, elected for a single seven-year term, is a largely ceremonial figure, but has the authority to name senior bureaucrats and judges and to return legislation to parliament.
Despite its EU-oriented reform drive, the AKP had fuelled secularist concerns with its opposition to a headscarf ban in universities and public offices and failed attempts to restrict alcohol sales and criminalise adultery.
08/27/2007 11:54 GMT