Moderate gets the nod from Turkey leadership

The ruling party on Tuesday chose Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as its presidential candidate, heading off a potential political confrontation that had starkly illustrated the split between religious and secular Turks.

Turkey’s more Islamist-minded prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also had weighed a run for the post, drawing sharp protests from the country’s establishment, including the army and the outgoing president. The country has a majority Muslim population but is an avowed secular state.

Nearly 300,000 people rallied on April 14 in the capital, Ankara, to protest a potential Erdogan candidacy.

Gul, a political moderate and an accomplished diplomat, is regarded as a much more palatable candidate, analysts said. He is virtually certain to win the presidency because his party holds a substantial majority in the 550-member parliament, which fills the position.

“Broader segments of Turkish society find it easier to accept Gul as president,” said Sahin Alpay, a political science professor at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul. “He’s been a competent foreign minister and is also someone who can work with other politicians and institutions.”

The presidential vote is to take place in four stages, the first this week and the last in mid-May.

The presidency is largely a ceremonial post, but it is vested with great symbolic authority because the office was once held by Turkey’s revered founding father, Kemal Ataturk, author of the country’s separation of religion and statehood. It has always been held by a secularist.

The outgoing president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, is a former constitutional judge who vetoed many bills he held to have conflicted with the secular constitution. The president is also the commander in chief of the military, which considers itself the main protector of the state’s secularism. Sezer’s seven-year term ends May 16.

The selection of Gul was announced in a nationally televised statement by the ruling Justice and Development Party. Both party leaders appeared before the cameras, with Erdogan predicting that Gul would be “embraced by all of Turkey.”

For hard-liners on both sides, the decision is something of a disappointment. Rigorous secularists are unhappy about seeing the post go to anyone from Gul’s party, which has Islamist origins. But the more religiously observant were sorry to see Erdogan abandon his bid.

Erdogan, though a popular prime minister, had alarmed secularists with a short-lived effort to criminalize adultery and with his call to lift the ban on wearing Islamic head scarves in government offices and schools.

During his four years in office, however, he has concentrated mainly on economic reforms and Turkey’s pursuit of European Union membership.

In giving up his presidential aspirations, Erdogan is now in a position to lead his party’s campaign in parliamentary elections this year. The party, which has pursued what it calls a conservative-democratic agenda, is expected to perform strongly in the polls.

Gul, who served briefly as prime minister in 2002 and 2003, made it his first order of business as a candidate to declare that the president “must be loyal to secular principles.”

“If the parliament elects me president, no one should doubt I will certainly act within these principles and the rules of the constitution,” he said.

Even with his moderate image, though, Gul stirs some unease among secularists. His wife, Hayrunnisa, wears an Islamic-style head scarf and once went to court to press her right to do so in an academic setting.

Turkey’s military, which has removed four governments from power during the last half a century, appeared ready to accept the candidacy of Gul. But the deputy chief of the armed forces, Gen. Ergun Saygun, issued a pointed reminder that the president should adhere to secular principles.

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king@latimes.com

Special correspondent Yesim Borg contributed to this report.