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The e-coup election

• Mark Mardell
• 17 Jul 07, 06:24 PM

ISTANBUL: It's one of those travel days. So was the day before. Yesterday morning saw me dismantling a tent in a field in Dorset, now I'm waiting in Istanbul airport for a flight to the Iraq-Turkey border.

There's still something thrilling about exotic names like Gaziantep, Erzurum, Trebizond (Son Gagri seems very popular... oh, no, that means "final call") coming up on the destination board. Well, more thrilling than hearing that emergency engineering meant all would be going through Basingstoke, anyway.

I'm here to cover the weekend's elections.

They are perhaps the first popular vote prompted by the world's first e-coup, when the army hinted on that it would intervene if the government pressed ahead with putting one of its own people up for . It is an interesting test for .

There are are many ways of describing this party... "Mildly Islamic", "has its roots in an Islamic party outlawed five years ago", or "Islamic in the same way that are Christian" might do. Of course, the party's opponents say it has a hidden fundamentalist agenda, but it is pretty well hidden. As one EU diplomat put it to me dryly: "Putting the entire body of EU law into Turkish law is hardly the best way of establishing a Sharia state." So some in the West see it as a model: Islamic, pro-Western, democratic.

But Turkish nationalists and the military believe that secularism is under attack. The reason for the army's anger and anguish is that , whose wife wears a headscarf, was nominated as president. The government has retaliated by suggesting the president should be directly elected, which would hand its candidate victory. Lots of other issues of course, but this is perhaps a test between the will of the people and the webolutionaries.

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