Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was elected Turkey's president today, the first former Islamist to take the post in the secular but predominantly Muslim country's modern history.
Armed forces chief General Yasar Buyukanit said yesterady he saw "centres of evil" seeking to undermine the secular republic, a statement suggesting the army would not stand on the sidelines if it saw the separation between religion and state threatened.
"Abdullah Gul in the third round obtained an absolute majority and was elected the 11th president of Turkey with 339 votes," parliament speaker Koksal Toptan said after the vote.
The Islamist-rooted AK Party has 341 seats in the 550-seat chamber. Two other candidates also stood for president. Mr Gul has established himself as a respected diplomat since the AK Party was first elected in 2002, securing the launch of Turkey's European Union entry talks.
He pledges to be a leader for all Turks, but he is not to the taste of a military that suspects the AK Party of harbouring a secret Islamist agenda. Many observers expect Mr Gul, who broke with an Islamist party in 1999, will try to avoid confrontation.
The secular elite and Turkey's generals, who have ousted four governments since 1960, are wary of Mr Gul's Islamist past and alarmed at the prospect of his wife wearing the Islamic headscarf in the Cankaya presidential palace. The headscarf is for many a potent symbol of the religious influence that soldier-turned-politician Mustafa Kemal Ataturk banished from public life when he founded the modern, Western-style republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
However, a survey conducted for the newspaper Milliyet showed 72.6 per cent of participants regarded it as "normal" for the wife of the president to wear a headscarf, while 19.8 per cent said they would be uncomfortable about it.