Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is keeping Turks guessing about whether he will run for president, but fears his bid could hurt his party's prospects in a parliamentary election could force him to forgo the top job.
Erdogan, Turkey's most charismatic and popular politician, has said his ruling centre-right AK Party will name its candidate for the May presidential election only in mid-April. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer's seven-year tenure ends on May 16.
"Erdogan wants the top job, but he fears this would divide his party and indeed the nation," said Suat Kiniklioglu, analyst at the Ankara-based German Marshall Fund of the United States.
"His top priority is his party's success. If he decides that running for president puts this in jeopardy, he won't run. Why become president if you then lose your parliamentary majority?"
Turkey must hold a parliamentary election by November. The AK Party is tipped to win the most seats again but it may fall short of a majority and be forced to ally with a smaller party, especially without Erdogan's vigorous leadership. Erdogan's chances of winning a presidential election would be high. His party has a big majority in parliament, which chooses the president.
But Turkey's secular elite, including army generals, oppose Erdogan, a former Islamist, becoming head of state. They fear he would try to undermine the division between state and religion and are also unhappy that his wife wears the Muslim headscarf. Secularists also fear Erdogan might try to change the constitution, possibly bolstering the president's powers.
Erdogan denies any Islamist agenda and his AK Party has proven pragmatic and pro-Western in office, presiding over the launch of EU accession talks, human rights reforms and strong economic growth since sweeping to power in November 2002.
That has not stopped his detractors. The anti-government Cumhuriyet daily is running a campaign saying an Erdogan presidency could turn the clock back 100 years in Turkey.
The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) has threatened to boycott the parliamentary vote if Erdogan stands and says it would have legal grounds to contest his election. An ex-speaker of parliament says Erdogan's election could be ruled invalid because of a criminal conviction he received in the late 1990s for reading an Islamist poem.
Turkey's business elite is also jittery, though it has not publicly urged Erdogan not to stand. "The president should be a conciliatory figure backed by all sections of society," Arzuhan Dogan Yalcindag, head of Turkey's main business lobby TUSIAD, said on Wednesday in Istanbul.
Behind these voices is the brooding presence of the army, ultimate guardian of Turkey's secular order, which ousted an elected government it deemed too Islamist as recently as 1997.
Nobody predicts another coup, but the army would watch a President Erdogan hawkishly, a fact sure to stoke tensions. All this pressure could backfire, said Wolfango Piccoli of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, because the combative Erdogan, 53, is keen to avoid giving any impression to voters that he lacks ambition or can be cowed by his enemies. "The opposition could end up helping Erdogan by turning him into an effective martyr," Piccoli said.
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