Turkey is living through a political trauma over who is to be its next president and whether the person selected will use the position to project Islamic values. Yesterday's decision by the constitutional court to annul last Friday's first round of voting throws the issue open and will probably mean elections planned for the autumn are held sooner.
Huge secularist street demonstrations against feared Islamicisation followed an alarming statement by the armed forces that they will not allow this to happen. Old stereotypes have been used to stoke up the confrontation, which badly needs to be cooled down.
For months the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), a reformist Islamic bloc, has been debating whether to nominate the prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as president. The decision is made in parliament, where the AKP has a clear majority it won decisively in 2002. Traditionally the presidency symbolises core values of the Turkish state. Elements of the powerful state bureaucracy, leaders of the armed forces and the main opposition party are convinced the AKP would use its influence to undermine Turkey's secular constitution by upsetting the balance between religious and secular values established when the state was founded in the 1920s.
AKP leaders believe they are entitled to take on the presidency based on their popular support. It has seen them introduce a wide-ranging political, economic and social reform programme over the last five years aimed at domestic and international constituencies - including in the European Union, membership of which the party believes will vindicate their religious and cultural rights. Mr Erdogan decided not to run as president and thought he had secured an acceptable candidate in Abdullah Gul, the foreign minister. But Mr Gul's wife wears the Islamic headscarf that is banned in state buildings. Using this as a symbol the secular opposition Republican People's Party abstained from the first round of voting last week and complained to the constitutional court that the result failed to get a quorum.
Several options face the government after the court's ruling. They could rerun the vote, provoking the secularist establishment to further vituperative opposition and tempt the armed forces into an ill-advised intervention. A better course would be to bring forward the elections and seek to vindicate the ruling party's mandate. This crisis has battered Turkey's stock market and shaken up its political system. A new round of constitutional negotiations is needed to calm down this polarisation and try to resolve the issue after elections.