Despite the unanimous support of his party, Abdullah Gul – nominee of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the candidate touted as favourite in the presidential run – was 28 votes short of becoming head of state. Not a surprise, both the Turkish press and foreign analysts said.

On August 20, Gul won 341 votes in the Turkish parliament. The other two candidates, Sabahattin Cakmaoglu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the largest opposition party, and Husein Igli from the Democratic Left Party (DSP), received 73 and 13 votes, respectively.

Despite the secrecy of the first-round procedure, the precise match between the number of pro-Gul votes and the number of AKP seats indicates Gul did not received a single vote from the opposition parties. Again not a surprise.

On the eve of the vote, Murat Yetkin, a journalist from the Radikal newspaper, which is said to have adopted the most non-censured approach to the contest, was quoted by the BBC news service as saying: “It is almost certain that Gul will not receive support from (the other political parties) CHP, the National Movement Party (MHP), DSP and probably not the True Path Party (DYP).”

The vote was overtly boycotted by CHP, as not a single CHP deputy featured on the turnout roster. The results from the vote showed that the other six opposition parties had covertly followed CHP’s example by not voting for Gul.

The situation illustrates the fact that the opposition has disregarded Gul’s pre-electoral pledges that under his rule the country would embrace a decisively anti-Islamic agenda. It has also, temporarily, stopped a potentially preposterous makeover of Gul’s wife into an idiosyncratic mix between a Muslim and a secular woman. Like Catherine Deneuve with a headscarf, Atil Kutoglu, a Vienna-based designer, said. Kutoglu was hired to devise the dress code of the first presidential wife to wear a headscarf.

The failed vote in the Turkish parliament came after an analogous fiasco in April this year when the incumbent foreign minister got a sweeping thumbs down and which led to a series of street protests, a military memorandum and a warning from the military.

The staunch opposition to Gul, a politician with roots in political Islam, pinpoints yet again that the divisions between the pro-secular and the covert Islamic causes in the Turkish parliament have yet to be completely resolved. As has the one between AKP and the army.

The seeming denial of consensus is a blight on the new mandate of parliament, and the underlying reasons for it have been put to words by the leader of CHP, Deniz Baykal. The secular and democratic system in Turkey is under threat, Baykal said in an August 21 interview with high-circulation Turkish daily Hurriyet.

Although the political situation is still far from smooth, things have changed since April, local and foreign commentators have said.

AKP has won a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections, winning 46.5 per cent of the vote. This proves yet again that despite the long-standing arguments between AKP, which is widely rumoured to be subscribing to an illicit return to the country’s Islamic roots, and the secular parties and the army, the public believed the electoral promises of AKP.

With much public support behind him, Gul is sure to eventually get the seat in the presidential palace, Cankaya. He has been given a boost by the recent landslide parliamentary victory of his party and the favourable readout of the local constitution. According to the main piece of legislation, the incumbent minister must get a two-thirds majority in the first and second rounds – 369 votes. In the third round, he only has to win a simple majority, which the yes votes of the 279 deputies of AKP, well within the power of his party, would give him.

The second round is scheduled for Friday, August 24, and the third round, if it is needed, will take place on August 28.

“He might well be elected the 11th president in the third round of elections,” Yetkin said.

With Gul as president, the AKP would have supremacy in the legislative, the executive – Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the head of government – and the Cankaya. If the AKP had control of these three areas, the Turkish press is alarmed that a gradual swerve to an Islamic agenda could not to be ruled out. It is not coincidental that the officials from the Turkish army said, in the week starting August 20, they would adopt a “wait-and-see approach”. The military has deposed four governments in the past few decades, yet a coup is not an option at present, military officials said, adding that tensions remained.

The situation is, nevertheless, aggravated by the fact that the Kurdish party, which for the first time in decades won fewer than a dozen deputy seats in parliament, did not support Gul. It is indicative of the fact that instead of clinging to AKP, the staunch opponent of military operations, it refrained from doing so. The Turkish press also interpreted this as a sign the Kurdish party disbelieve that Gul and his party will keep the thousands of troops in Kurdish territories in northern Turkey at bay. There is an uneasy peace in the area between the Kurds and the Turks. The troops were deployed several months ago on the pretext it is defending the border from an unstable Iraq.

Nevertheless, local analysts believe that a face-off between the army and the opposition on one side and AKP on the other will not produce any violent effects.

“Turkey has too much to lose these days to risk a coup. It’s too tied into global markets – and the Turkish people would not support it,” Sedat Laciner, an analyst at USAK Strategic Research Organisation, said, as quoted by the BBC.

As Baykal described the situation in an interview with CNN Turk television, Gul is a “conscious member of an ideological circle” who would lead the country in a new direction.

Gul is likely win the presidency, eventually. Yet the world remains on alert as to which way Turkey, which has been the secular stronghold in the Middle East for the past 80 years, will head.