Abdullah Gul, the Turkish Foreign Minister, has again been nominated as the ruling party’s candidate for president, three months after his last nomination prompted threats from the Army as thousands took to the streets in protest at his Islamist past.

Mr Gul, whose wife’s Muslim head-scarf has outraged the country’s self-styled secular elite, is now almost certain to become President. His Justice and Development Party (AK), fresh from a landslide election win, holds enough MPs for the simple majority required in the three-round parliamentary vote.

The British-educated Mr Gul once belonged to an Islamist party but now champions secularism and democracy within the pro-European Union AK. He points to his Government’s pro-Western, pro-market record as proof of his sincerity. His detractors claim that he shares a secret plan to Islamise the state with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, another Islamist turned reformist.

Last month’s early general election was triggered by the failure of the previous Parliament to choose a president, amid street protests and a warning from the military that they were concerned about the ascent of the strongly devout Muslim to the highest position in the State.

The Republican People’s Party, the main opposition, then boycotted the vote for Mr Gul and persuaded the Constitutional Court – considered part of the secularist elite – to rule that a higher quorum than in previous elections had been required. This time most parties have promised to attend the vote, ensuring its validity.

A senior AK party official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mr Gul’s candidacy was announced at a board meeting yesterday, but is as yet officially unconfirmed. It will be seen as a clear message to the militarist establishment that the AK is determined to challenge a status quo in which politicians eventually do as they are told by an army that has dislodged four governments since 1960.

“Turkey is not going through a political crisis, but a crisis of history,” Mehmet Altan, a political commentator told the Radikalnewspaper. “The fight is about whether [the Presidential Palace] should be occupied by someone who will discipline a military-civilian bureaucracy not used to playing by the rules. The election results clearly showed that the people want the traces of military interference to be erased.”

Despite the impression of a secularist-Islamist struggle and the sincere fears of hundreds of thousands of urban antigovernment protesters who took to the streets in May, most people who supported the Government did not come from Islamist backgrounds. Rather, they voted in the belief that the AK sought further reform and had no interest in overturning the separation of mosque and state.

Mr Erdogan, whose first-term achievements included securing EU accession talks and economic and democratic reform, has been progressively replacing the more conservative members of the AK party with modernists. These include former social democrats, top investment bankers and women. A test of his determination will be the prominence he gives the new secularist faces in his Cabinet.

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