TURKEY'S HIGHEST court pulled the country back from the brink of chaos yesterday when it narrowly rejected calls for the country's ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, to be closed for alleged anti-secularist activities.
After 30 hours of debate, six judges voted in favour of banning the party, four voted for financial penalties and one rejected the case, the Constitutional Court chief, Hasim Kilic, said.
Seven judges would have had to vote in favour of the ban for it to pass. Instead of that nuclear option, the court contented itself with a sharp slap on the wrist for AKP, with all but one judge voting to remove half the party's state funding.
Calls for five-year political bans against 71 AKP politicians including prime minister Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul were also dropped. "There's only one word to describe my reaction to the decision," said Koksal Toptan, AKP's speaker in parliament. "Phew."
The closure case was sparked by AKP's clumsy efforts to end a ban on headscarves in universities this February. Since a senior prosecutor brought the indictment in mid-March, politics here has been paralysed, blocking the country's struggling European Union bid and pushing decades-long tensions between pious and secular-minded Turks to a boiling point.
"Turkey desperately needed an immediate lowering of pressure," the AKP minister of culture, Ertugrul Gunay, told the private television CNN-Turk. "I think this decision will help with that."
The court decision came as something of a surprise. Packed with judges appointed by a fiercely secularist former president, the court has sparked major debate twice over the past year with controversial decisions against the government.
Reaction from Europe was equally upbeat. "Turkey is living a very tense situation and we very much hope that the decision . . . will contribute to restore political stability", said Cristina Gallach, spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, describing the ruling as "positive".
Yet AKP can in no way be said to have got off scot free. In essence, the votes of 10 out of 11 judges were an expression of concern for the way AKP has behaved since it won 47 per cent of votes at elections last year.
"The AKP has a lot of lessons to learn from the ruling," says Atilla Kart, a senior member of the staunchly secularist chief opposition party. "I hope [senior party members] remember the content of the speeches that were made after last year's electoral victory", he added, referring to Mr Erdogan's promise to be a party for all Turks.
What happens next depends on how AKP reacts. Mr Erdogan recently admitted his party had made mistakes, and many deputies privately admit they are concerned with the path their leader has taken.
Bulent Aliriza, a Turkish expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, thinks talk of an end to the political crisis is optimistic to say the least.
While it is less powerful than in the past, he says, Turkey's secularist establishment, headed by the military, shows few signs of accepting the model of "democratic secularism" that AKP proposed in its defence to the court. "Turkey's old political model has been shown to be out of date, but there is still no consensus on what might replace it," he says.