Word: turkeys
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...That clash came to a head on May 1 when Turkey's Constitutional Court annulled the first round of elections in Parliament that would have made Gul President. Handpicked by his longtime ally Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gul was ahead in the ballot, but the court, in a ruling that appeared to betray its secularist bias, upheld claims by Turkey's main secularist political party that the balloting was unconstitutional because a quorum wasn't present-no matter that the opposition engineered that shortfall by boycotting the vote, or that at least one President had previously been elected with...
...army general Riza Kucukoglu said the military is now prepared to step back "because democracy is working," but he insisted that the ruling party was to blame for the crisis because it chose to nominate a "religious President." If the army fails to "deal with extremist ideology," he added, "Turkey could become a swamp that threatens not only the region but Europe and the U.S. as well...
...irony is that Turkey has been held up in recent years as a heartening example of a state that successfully straddled the Western and Islamic worlds, keeping religious extremism at bay while displaying an impressive combination of stable governance and economic vigor. Now its status as a role model is in doubt. "We thought we had developed the ability to democratically resolve our issues," says Hakan Altinay, director of the Open Society Institute, a pro-democracy group in Istanbul. "We can't say that now. A society that cannot reach a consensus on its own has a serious problem." Mark...
...military meddling, the stakes are high indeed. The threat of further political turmoil is already spooking investors, with Turkish shares tumbling 8% on Monday alone. A political impasse threatens to slow or reverse democratic reforms that were under way to meet European Union norms, and could further complicate Turkey's strained relations with Europe. Some E.U. membership negotiations are already on hold, and they are not likely to resume if the government cannot agree on who's in charge. Senior E.U. official Olli Rehn has said Turkey's handling of the crisis will be a "test case" in terms...
...Kemal Ataturk, who mandated in 1923 a strict divide between mosque and state. (He banned the fez, and modeled his constitution on the Swiss Civil Code.) The secular middle class that grew out of that tradition, filling the ranks of the bureaucracy and profiting from its largesse, has dominated Turkey's political and economic landscape for most of the last century. The Turkish army has served as a guarantor of this successful arrangement. The self-appointed guardians of Ataturk's "Kemalist" legacy launched four coups in response to perceived threats; the latest, characterized as a "soft coup" because tanks...