Slim, petite and dressed in a fashionably sculpted white jacket and skirt, the young woman sipping a mocha looks pretty much like anybody else in Starbucks. Zeynep Karaman, 22, a software engineer, removes her dark glasses and narrows her eyes in the sunlight reflecting off Istanbul’s rippling Bosphorus Strait.

She talks about her love of jazz, Audrey Hepburn and Tolstoy. But what really animates her is Lewis Hamilton, the British Formula One newcomer who drives for McLaren. “I support Ferrari, though, so I am extremely worried by his rise,” she says.

There is one thing that separates Miss Karaman from this particular crowd: the floral headscarf wound tightly around her head and neck. The Islamic head covering – a red rag to a bull for Turkey’s self-proclaimed protectors of the secular state – and its role in public life provides the back-drop for tomorrow’s early elections.

When Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, proposed his Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, as president, the secular elite sprang into action. Backed by mass demonstrations, they manoeuvred to gridlock parliament and effectively brought down the Government. The objection was not Mr Gul’s merits as leader. Rather, it was that his wife would wear the headscarf in the secular bastion of the presidential palace. Perhaps because of that background, the polls are unusually female-centred. A record number of women candidates are standing.

Yet even though nearly two thirds of Turkish women cover their heads, not a single candidate has a headscarf. Not even from Mr Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which was formed from the moderate wing of an Islamist party and boasts large numbers of head-scarf-wearing foot soldiers.

Part of the reason is a heightened sensitivity among the traditional secularist ruling elite with a new middle class of devout Muslims, according to academics and commentators. This class – businessmen, entrepreneurs, their academically ambitious daughters such as Miss Karaman – has increased the visibility of the headscarf in smart urban environments, unsettling a sector of society hitherto used to mixing only with its own.

This unease is all too visible in chic Istanbul. “What the hell are they doing here?” asked a customer in a waterfront café of two smart women sipping lattes and puffing cigarettes, their outfits of pristine chinos and blouses topped off by designer headscarves. The headscarved Turk – previously lacking ambition and social status, and tolerated as unthreatening – is now modern, upwardly mobile and better educated and wants more. And finding the State’s secular strictures standing in her way.

For the secularist public, fears about the rise of the new class are very real. “Women have always covered up but recently this has become an ideology,” said Gulderen Onat, a retired teacher who espouses Turkey’s secular values. Her mother, 87, who occasionally wore a chador in the early days of the republic but now wears a simple headscarf, agrees: “I’m old so it’s appropriate for me to wear a scarf. But now these young women are going too far.”

Mr Erdogan, who polls suggest will win reelection comfortably, is trying to place his party in the mainstream and avoid charges of Islamism. His party’s highest-profile women candi-ates give little ammunition to antigovernment voters who view AKP as backward-looking and religious. Some, like the former banker and businesswoman Nursuna Memecan, and Ozlem Turkone, one of Turkey’s youngest district governors, were head-hunted especially by the AKP leadership. “I have friends who said I was mad to join AK,” laughed Mrs Memecan, from her stylish flat overlooking the Bosphorus which she uses for parties when they are over from the US. “But this is not the Islamist, ultra-con-servative party its opponents say it is.”

She advocates education reform as a way out of the impasse and creating an open-minded generation. “We want to encourage the inquiring child, who is not fed information so much as taught how to get it and apply logic,” she said. “That is the way to make them more tolerant and democratic.”

A tolerance, she hopes, that will erode the rigidity of people such as the woman opposition party candidate whom she met on the campaign trail, while accompanied by an AKP stalwart wearing a headscarf. “She saw us and said: “Ugh! Don’t let that headscarved woman anywhere near me!’ – as if she had seen a monster.”

What they think

64% of Turks surveyed in 2005 considered a ban on headscarves in public places a bad idea

45% thought Islamic extremism a threat to the country

77% of respondents surveyed last year favoured democracy as the best form of government

550 number of seats in the Turkish parliament

Sources: Pew Research Centre; Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation; European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs; Grand National Assembly of Turkey website (www.tbmm.gov.tr)

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