The Turkish Presidency of Ahmet Necdet Sezer is about to end. The Parliament has to elect the eleventh President of the Republic before May 16th. The only candidate in the race, supported by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is Abdullah Gul, currently the country’s foreign minister. Gul has quite a long track record in politics. He has been a member of parliament for Refah, the first Islamist party in power in Turkey. It later dissolved and he represented Fazilet, the Party of Virtue. He was also one of the founders of the AK Party. A pious Muslim, this makes him an object of distrust to some of Turkey's secularists. This is the reason behind the demonstrations of April 14th in Ankara and April 30th in Istanbul where thousands of citizens protested against the idea of a pro-Islamic government. The Turkish Army, whose main goal is to defend the secularism of the country, backs these protests. A clash of powers can be seen between Parliament-President on the one hand and Army-people on the other. After the first round of ballots failed on April 27th, the next steps will be a second and possibly a third round on May 5th and May 9th. The hope is that this turmoil does not hinder the economic development Turkey has been witnessing in the last years. | 
