The comment by Turkey’s Opposition leader, Deniz Baykal, says it all: “The Republic is going back into the hands of its true owner.”

While the crisis in Turkey over the possible election of its first president with an Islamist past looks like a battle between secularists and Islamic traditionalists - with the very fabric of secular Turkish society at stake - the reality is in fact very different.

The secularist-Islamist struggle is an important element that cannot be overlooked. However, the tussle, which escalated late on Friday when the military weighed in with a threat to act, is more about the people who have become accustomed to their kind running the country and how far they are willing to allow democracy to infringe against the strict spirit of Turkey’s constitution.

And the results of the row could be a period of chaos that will benefit no-one at a time when Turkey, a candidate for the European Union, is enjoying a rare spell of political stability and low inflation.

Mr Baykal’s definition of the Republic’s true owner would be the secularist elite – people like him, and the military they are so fond of, top secularist judges, bureaucrats, and those Turks who consider themselves to be the best advertisement for the vision of Kemal Ataturk, the blond blue-eyed military hero who was modern Turkey's founding president. The sort of people, in fact, who turned up in their thousands to this weekend’s mass anti-Government rally in Istanbul and another similar march in Ankara two weeks ago.

The people Mr Baykal would imagine do not own the Republic, but have managed to get hold of its ruling ranks through the inconvenient matter of elections, are people such as the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was once imprisoned for sedition and has a wife who wears a headscarf in the traditional Islamic manner, and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, the presidential candidate and a respected international figure who shares Mr Erdogan’s Islamist past and also has a headscarf-wearing wife.

Both have vowed that they are committed secularists and have made more headway than any previous administration in taking Turkey towards EU membership, but that cuts no ice with their detractors, who fear dastardly plots to make Turkey more Islamic by stealth. If Mr Gul is elected, his opponents cry, his party of former Islamists will control both the Government and the institution which was supposed to be a control mechanism against its excesses. Symbolically worse, the wives of all top three positions of Prime Minister, Parliament Speaker and President will have headscarves and represent modern secular Turkey with an image it has been trying to escape since it became a republic more than 80 years ago.

It does not seem to concern Mr Baykal and other proudly secularist leaders that the opposition parties are quite at liberty to overturn the Government and defuse any perceived Islamic threat in elections if only they would stop in-fighting and produce some policies and a leader that the electorate would vote for.

The Constitutional Court is set to decide tomorrow or on Wednesday whether to accept an Opposition demand to annul the presidential vote on the legally dubious grounds that their boycott ensured there was not a quorum in the first round of voting in Palriament last week. Then, Mr Gul fell just 10 votes short of the required two-thirds majority and on present form he would win in the third round, where a simple majority is required.

The Court is comprised mainly of secularist judges and may well bear in mind the military’s thinly-disguised attempt to influence the process.

It has prevaricated so far, in the apparent hope that the Government will bow to pressure and call early elections and spare it from making a decision that will be regarded as political.

An early election is what people from many sides now hope Turkey will opt for as a way of defusing the tension. Elections are normally due by November, but polls even a few months earlier would mean the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK) would have to wait and see if it had a big enough majority to elect a president.

But in themselves the elections may not solve much. If AK won, would the army and the secularists be silenced by the ballot box or would they step up the pressure? An alternative scenario is that the result would lead to the sort of feeble, squabbling coalitions that sank Turkey’s prospects and credibility in the 1990s.

Opposition for opposition’s sake - couched as it is in the guise of saving the country from peril - is more likely to harm than protect the democracy that Turkey's Opposition purports to hold so dear. The Constitutional Court, full of judges who have little truck with Islamists, would nevertheless be making a big mistake if it were to indulge the emotive challenge set before it.

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