TURKEY:Polls ahead of Sunday's elections show the secular opposition heading for only 20 per cent of the vote, writes Nicholas Birchin Istanbul.
Ask political scientist Ahmet Insel what Turkey's biggest problem is, and he replies without hesitation: "The secularist opposition". Self-styled social democrat Deniz Baykal, a preternaturally smiling 69-year-old who has lost four consecutive elections since he took over at the head of Turkey's secularist Republican People's Party (CHP) in 1988, arouses strong feelings in a lot of Turks.
"I'll be voting for the secularists, but I hope to God they don't get into government," says Ersin Oktay, an Istanbul businessman.
It's a comment you hear a lot among educated Turks, natural supporters of Turkey's oldest party, founded by Kemal Ataturk, the man who pulled the country out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
Pro-western and at ease in Turkey's increasingly liberal economy, people such as Oktay are horrified by Baykal's anti-European rhetoric and fondness for Hugo Chávez-style economic nationalism. But they need not worry that he will be in power after parliamentary elections on Sunday. Polls show him heading for only 20 per cent of the vote, and his fifth defeat in a row.
The exact scale of the victory awaiting Baykal's Islamic-rooted bugbear - the Justice and Development Party, or AKP - remains unclear. Some polls show support for it close to 50 per cent. It is almost certain to win more than the 34 per cent it won in 2002.
Yet votes in Turkey don't necessarily translate into seats. With right-wing nationalists looking set to win the 10 per cent of votes required for parliamentary representation, and potentially form a coalition with Baykal's party, AKP is almost certain to fall short of the two-thirds of seats it needs to elect a president and push through constitutional change.
For international investors, wooed by AKP's pro-western, pro-market policies but wary of its sometimes confrontational relations with secularists in the judiciary and army, that is an ideal outcome. Last week, Istanbul's stock exchange - more than 70 per cent foreign-owned - shot to historic highs.
Editor of a recent book on the AKP, political scientist Hakan Yavuz is one of many who thinks investors are over-optimistic.
The parliament Turkey will wake up to next week, he says, will contain Kurdish nationalists, Turkish nationalists, ultra-secularists and the AKP, "an incendiary collection". "Turkey desperately needs to bridge its divisions, but it looks set to elect a parliament that will only consolidate them," he says.
The first point of tension will be renewed elections for the traditionally secularist post of president. The government's failure in May to elect a man whose wife wears a headscarf triggered Sunday's elections.
This time, prime minister Tayyip Erdogan has signalled a willingness to compromise, and his new parliamentary group contains a handful of centrist candidates aimed at assuaging fears that he is trying to chip away at the country's secularist structure.
But scepticism about his party remains high, and not just among men like Mr Oktay.
The AKP has above all failed to win over roughly 10 million Turkish Alevis, members of a heterodox Shia sect that has long been persecuted by the country's Sunni majority.
"Window-dressing," says Izzettin Dogan, head of one of the country's most powerful Alevi groups, referring to AKP's decision to field a well-known Alevi writer among its candidates on Sunday. "No self-respecting Alevi would vote for this party."
Ultimately, though, a potentially more dangerous issue facing Turkey's new government looks to be the Kurdish issue. An ongoing campaign by Kurdish rebels has bolstered nationalists of the National Action Party - expected to win about 14 per cent of the vote - and deepened Turkish mistrust of the West.
Support for the US, in particular, is at an all-time low amid rumours in the Turkish press that Washington is supplying the Kurdish rebels with weapons.
Editors of daily Cumhuriyet - flagship of the secularists - appear in no doubt where the greatest danger lies.
They played a major role stoking up secularist fears in the run-up to May's presidential election. Its front page now sports a big black advert calling on readers to "bury the separatists in the polling boxes". It's an oblique reference to AKP's failure to give in to calls for army operations against Kurdish rebel camps in northern Iraq.
The tactic dismays Mr Insel. The secularists know they cannot win, he says, so they "reinforce fear, of Kurds, the West, traitors, Islamic law, the military".
Campaign manager for a prominent dissident intellectual standing as an independent candidate to protest at the increasingly authoritarian tone of Turkish politics, he thinks it is time Turkish voters learned to trust themselves.
"We're campaigning to liberate people from fear," he says.
In a country where educated people quite seriously tell you that foreign investors are buying up land so as to make away with it, that looks to be a tough job.