A day before Turkish parliament’s third presidential vote, Abdullah Gul threw a farewell party for his colleagues at the foreign ministry, the Turkish media reported on August 27. The fete did not serve as a bad omen. The third round of voting for the president, on August 28, proved to be the last one.

Gul won 339 votes in a 456-vote turnout. According to Turkish legislation, a candidate needed a simple majority or 276 votes in a 550-seat parliament, in the third round, to pave his way to the presidential palace. The incumbent foreign minister received the unequivocal support of his party, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), as he did in the previous two rounds.

There is no doubt the presidential victory was an historic one. The result meant that the first politician with roots in political Islam now sat in Cankaya, the president’s residence.

It was no less historically symbolic as it was illustrative of a fundamental shift in society’s perceptions. The shift was so stark that it completely transformed Turkey’s political landscape. In June 2007, in an article for Spiegel, Ahmet Altan, a renowned Turkish writer and columnist, wrote of the deep cultural divide between the secular and Muslim strata of society, which in the decades under Ataturk’s (the founder of modern Turkey) republic had only got wider.

Soner Cagaptay, a professor who will teach Turkish secularism at Georgetown University this autumn, agreed in an article in Newsweek. He confirmed the existence of a divide, yet underlined it had shifted from a secular-fundamentalist to a secular-Muslim one.

It was these changes in the arrangement in society that produced the fundamental shift in Turkey’s political landscape. Gul’s ambitions for the presidential seat was the process that confirmed the shift.

In April, when Gul made his first bid for the presidential office, the secularists were still standing tall. While secular parties mobilised partisans to take to the streets, the army issued an e-memorandum, on April 27, that warned of the looming danger of a return of the Sharia state and of a presidential candidate who had the resolve to be part of its reinstatement.

The memorandum evoked memories of a Gul who, in an interview with the UK daily The Guardian a decade ago, forewarned of the end of the republic and said that along with his compatriots, he would induce a major change to the secular establishment. He even said that the days of Ataturk’s republic were numbered.

Yet ever since then Gul had changed his political profile. From a pro-Islamic, it gradually changed to a moderately conservative or at most a Muslim democratic one. So did his party’s. This gave power to their political messages, triggered the perceptual change, sparked early parliamentary elections and led to AKP’s landslide victory.

The election of Gul is the starkest example of this shift as the presidency has always been considered the defence force of secularism. Gul’s wife will be the first woman who wears a headscarf to enter the presidential palace.

This historic victory poses other questions, among the most important being whether the messages of the secular establishment, the parties and the army alike, have not grown obsolete. Nonetheless, the military has continued to try to guard the country from the Islamisation threat, the latest message being sent on August 27 by the chief of general staff, General Yasar Buyukanit.

Yet do these nearly apocalyptic warnings ring true with the people?

An August 28 poll, conducted by Turkish daily Milliyet, said only one in three Turks was fearful of the return of the Sharia state. And it is not immediately associated with the ruling AKP.

Amberin Zaman, the Economist’s correspondent for Turkey, told The Sofia Echo that the public saw the Islamisation threat as a thing of the past.

“The army April 27 e-memorandum (which first spelled the army’s apprehensions for the AKP’s covert Islamist agenda) backfired as evidenced by the strong showing of the AKP that surpassed even its own expectations,” Zaman said. “So does Gul, who used the elections to promote his presidency.”

She also attributes Gul’s victory to the inability of secular parties to transcend their traditional political manifestos and listen to the changing society.

“For too long Turkey was run buy a self-styled pro-secular elite based on their very narrowly defined interest and world view,” Zaman said.

While the secularists have failed to reform, the AKP has done the opposite in a very dynamic way. This was highlighted by the results of the 2002 elections when the AKP took power in Turkey.

This period witnessed huge economic advances, which assured Turkey of the AKP’s managerial abilities. Besides, the party showed few signs of a repeat of Erbakan’s 1996/97 attempt for a secretive re-establishment of the Sharia state, which led to the army’s latest intervention in ousting a government.

This combination stripped the army’s Islamisation trumpeting of meaning.

“The Turkish people are fed up of scaremongering which too often has been to perpetuate the army’s influence over politics,” Zaman said.

She also saw the army’s role as a major factor in politics as having been halted, as it had lost much of its public support.

“Unless there is a clear and present danger of the regime shifting away from its pro-western, pro-secular course there should be no reason for the army to intervene,” Zaman said.

Currently the danger was nowhere in sight, she said.

The new face of the AKP, against the background of an ailing lack of reform from secularist political establishment, has given it unprecedented access to the presidential palace. And its power is now three-pronged, holding a 46.5 per cent majority in parliament, a president and the government, which would be formed shortly, prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on August 28.

Gul has also appeased the public as he has backtracked from his decade-long definition of the EU as a “Christian club”, to which Turkey could never belong. In his capacity as foreign minister, Gul made substantial advances in Turkey’s EU bid.

“Turkey will not be bullied out of the ring,” Zaman said in respect to Turkey’s aspirations. “If the government (and president alike) lives up to its pledges, the most important among them being the introduction of a brand new constitution, Turkey will be unstoppable (in its EU bid),” Zaman said.

President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso spoke in agreement with this statement, just hours after Gul’s election. Gul’s election “creates an opportunity for a new, fresh and positive pull to the accession process and for advances in a number of fields”, he said.

Gul confirmed he would remain loyal to his policy to date, keeping the EU accession and Iraq at the top of his agenda.

It seems the AKP’s is here to stay. At least until the secularists find the drive for reform, propagate the changes right to people and return former pro-seculars to their fold.