Turkish politics

I'll expound on what I wrote earlier...

In May, the Turkish military and the main secular opposition party blocked Abdullah Gul's candidacy, a block legitamized by a high court ruling. This blocking promted a national election, in which the populus voted overwhelmingly for Gul's AK (Justice and Development) party. On Tuesday the Turkish Parliament voted him in as Turkey's President.

An economist by trade, Gul formerly represented the now defunkt openly Islamist Welfare Party (banned by the military in 1997). amd mpw represents the AK party. A conservative and religious man, he possesses a middle class background and hails from Turkey's consevative, religious Anatolian heartland. Due to his background, he is somewhat of an outsider in Turkey's Western-leaning, secular, upper-class dominated political scene.

Few Turks, so I've read and heard, want a religious government, but they voted overwhelmingly for the AK party, in power since 2002, simply because it has done well running the country.

For the past 84 years, since its inception in 1923, Turkey's government has been controlled by secularists. He is the first president in Turkey's history to come from a non-secular party, and his election is the first time that a party has prevailed against military opposition. When first nominated as a candidate, secularists staged mass rallies and the military threatened to intervene. The military has ousted four elected governments since 1960. None of Turkey's military commanders attended Gul's appointment ceremony.

Although he has consistently denied possessing any sort of Islamist agenda and has emphasized his commitment to Turkey's secular values, many view his as a potential threat to the separation of religion and politics in Turkey...