Turkey elects new president

Abdullah Gul's election as his country's 11th president has effectively demolished many a myth about the Turkish polity and politics. For instance, early this year his candidature for the president's office provoked strong reaction from the secularists who held huge rallies all over the country, prompting the armed forces to intervene.
But the majority of Turkish people supported his party in the snap elections that followed, resulting in further strengthening his party's position in the parliament, which elected him last Tuesday in the third round.
The same secularists who had flooded the streets protesting against his Islamist credentials, now seem to have quietly accepted Gul's electoral victory. Another myth that his election demolished was that the West is hostile to Turkish Islamist politics.
Rather, the new Turkish president received unusually prompt and warm congratulatory greetings from the leaders in the West, including President Bush who was one of the firsts to ring him up. No doubt, his party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come a long way from the days when they together founded Justice and Development Party (AKP) on the ashes of Necmettin Erbakan's outlawed Islamist Virtue Party (FP), but Abdullah Gul was still considered to be a radical Islamist under his skin.
Overlooking that perception, the Western leaders appear to be greatly impressed by the way he conducted his country's foreign policy during his tenure as foreign minister. His election is seen in the West as symptomatic of a changed Turkey - from an introverted nationalistic military power hardened by an admixture of Kemalism and Cold War, when it was the frontline state of the so-called Free World, to a globalise market-economy country which is seeking a close relationship with Europe.
However, there is a question whether West's enthusiastic welcome would help the Erdogan-Gul combine survive the hostility harboured by the armed forces. Of course, the newly elected leader took some immediate steps to remove doubts in the military mind about his Islamist image. If the armed forces' leadership had boycotted his swearing-in ceremony, his scarf-wearing wife Hayrunnisa, bete noire to the secularists, was not present at that function either.
Then, the newly elected president saw to it that he would undertake his first journey to the mausoleum of the founding father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Hopefully, these balancing tactics would help avert the possibility of a clash between the military and the AKP government. Over the inevitable tension between the two centres of power once during the initial period, the threat to Turkish democracy is bound to dilute and then evaporate. Everybody, including the military top brass, is acutely aware of the fact that Gul has been elected by the silent Turkish majority, who are neither secularists nor Islamist fundamentalists.
This majority appears determined to continue with the pace of economic reforms and uplift that materialised during the four years of AKP government under the leadership of Prime Minister Erodgan. The appointment of Ali Babacan as foreign minister, who as finance minister had headed his government's path-breaking dialogue with the European Union for membership, is expected to further boost Turkey 's role as an economic partner of the West.
At the same time, prominent display in the Turkish media of the greetings sent to the new president by OIC and Muslim countries, including Pakistan and Iran, would greatly help the world at large to see political Islam in a better light. The world should now understand that under an Islam-rooted government the Turkish economy has been fully rehabilitated and that militarily-dominated politics have given way to a strong, vibrant democracy.