Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan reaffirmed his secular credentials on Tuesday and rejected his opponents' claims he is trying to take Turkey down an Islamist path.
Erdogan's ruling Islamist-rooted AK Party, has been locked in a fierce battle in recent weeks with Turkey's secular elite, including army generals and top judges, over a presidential election it has now been forced to postpone.
Erdogan has called parliamentary polls for July 22, months ahead of schedule, in a bid to defuse the crisis. Investors fear AK may lose its parliamentary majority, pitching Turkey back into coalition wrangling that hampered the economy in the 1990s. "I am a secularist, in the sense that I am defending a secular state," Erdogan told a conference of the International Press Institute in televised remarks.
"It would be a mistake to pit secularism against Islam," he said, adding they were not in conflict with one another. He said it was wrong to try to use either for narrow political gains.
Erdogan, a pious Muslim who once served a short jail sentence for reading a poem the authorities deemed Islamist, has long denied claims he is trying to boost the role of religion in society, but some secularists deeply distrust him and his party.
Opposition parties successfully derailed AK's bid to have parliament elect Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, an ex-Islamist whose wife wears the Muslim headscarf, as president. They argued this would remove a last political check on AK power.
Keeping up the pressure on Erdogan, more than one million people joined an anti-government rally in the Aegean city of Izmir on Sunday, the latest in a series of mass protests.
Erdogan noted that protesters had carried banners saying "No to a military coup, no to Sharia (Islamic) law", and said his government fully shared that sentiment. Turkey's military General Staff recently threatened to intervene in politics as it has done four times in the past 50 years if it felt the secular order was at risk.
"To talk of revolutions, military coups and Sharia law is to do an injustice to our government and our people. We have been in power for four and a half years. Why suddenly these rumours of coups and Sharia law?" Erdogan asked.
He denied his opponents' claims that the centre-right AK Party was a religion-oriented party and said its priority was to modernise Turkey's economy, laws and society.
The AK Party, widely predicted to win July's election, has presided over strong economic growth and the launch of European Union membership talks since sweeping to power in November 2002. In his comments, Erdogan reiterated government determination to take Turkey into the EU. He said he hoped France's President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy, a strong opponent of Turkey's EU bid, would change his attitude towards Ankara.
"Sarkozy must overcome his prejudice (against Turkey)," Erdogan said, adding that European politicians' public antipathy to Turkey fuelled Euroscepticism among the Turkish public. Ankara began EU entry talks in 2005 but is not seen joining the wealthy bloc until 2015 at the earliest.