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 looked to be edging towards a secularist victory after the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential vote’s first round on Tuesday, 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. It would include many of the sort of people 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 ruled in line with an Opposition demand to annul the presidential vote on the grounds that their boycott ensured there was not a quorum in the first round of voting in Parliament last week. It ruled against the advice of its own researcher, against precedent and notably just days after the staunchly secularist military’s thinly disguised attempt to influence the process by threatening to act in order to defend secularism.

The likely outcome now is an early election, which is what people from many sides now hope will defuse 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.

Now the Turkish opposition parties are discussing the prospects of uniting for the upcoming election and giving the protesters and the mass of anti-AK voters a clear address for their vote – thus, hopefully avoiding a descent into coalition hell. But already signs of dissent and discord are being reported as the leaders of various factions – most notably Mr Baykal – appear as unlikely as ever to let the good of the people get in the way of their egotistical attachment to the title of party leader.

In fact, the problem in Turkish democracy today – unless it turns out that AK does indeed have a dastardly plan that has fooled all-comers apart from the conspiracy theorists – is the lack of coherent opposition and the kind of factionalism that means the secularist majority is split into ineffective blocks.

In the absence of proper political platforms – as opposed to personal high horses, the default setting for the secular leaders in today’s Turkey has been” to oppose”. Specific Government plans are rarely discussed, so-called social democrats oppose EU-friendly social legislation for the sake of courting nationalists who believe the Government is trading away their identity, and no policies are produced because, frankly, why bother when your only selling point is not being the Government party?

This sort of 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 than anything that the Government has done so far.

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