Before today’s court decision, Mr. Gul had faced another round of parliamentary voting this week in order to be confirmed as president. Mr. Erdogan may now propose another candidate or, more likely, call a general election. ~The New York Times

This confrontation between the constitutional court and AK was only a matter of time.  Putting forward Gul as the sole candidate for president has served as a dangerous provocation to the army.  Practically speaking, if you want an example of how an Islamist party is a threat to Turkish representative government you need only take account of the likelihood that the Islamist party is likely to provoke a military coup against it.  Someone will object that this isn’t the Islamists’ fault–what policies do they advocate that would actually undermine democratic norms or constitutional protections?  At the moment, none, obviously, because if they so much as blink the wrong way the army will overthrow the government.  They have played a clever tactical game in which they are more pro-European than the secularists, but it is purely tactical, as I would hope anyone can see.  Does anyone really think that the condition of religious minorities in Turkey, for example, will become better under a more assertively Islamist government in the future?  Is it reassuring to, say, the remaining Armenians in Turkey that the current PM is a man who was imprisoned because he recited a poem by Ziya Gokalp, arch-ideologue of the bad, old CUP, that spoke of “our minarets” being like bayonets? 

To take as evidence of future intentions AK’s tactical maneuvers to get Turkey into the EU (which won’t work anyway) is to mistake them for a happy socially conservative social democratic party that just happens to be full of Muslims.  That seems a mistaken reading of the situation to me.  It’s true that there are Islamists, and then there are Islamists, but there is necessarily something in political Islam that is not compatible with representative government because the claims of Islam in the political realm generally are broad enough and expansive enough that they leave no space for the free public space needed to cultivate what anyone else would recognise as a pluralistic or democratic order. 

You might be able to argue that a mass Islamic republic, such as Turkey could well become if Kemalism collapses, does not necessarily have to represent some great danger, but I will insist that people recognise that a mass Islamic republic and a pluralistic republican democracy are nowhere near the same thing.  For the latter to be maintained, it would be necessary for the bulk of AK’s voters to appreciate and desire such an arrangement, when it seems to me that they do not.  From a realistic foreign policy perspective, it is important to note that the rise of successful Islamism in Turkey has coincided with the gradual drift of Turkey away from the West.  We may never see a return to Erbakan-like proposals for Islamic economic unions and the like, but the priorities and desires of AK voters do not lie in becoming more like Europe.  This is why it is not possible to take at face value AK’s current pro-EU position and all of the reformism that the drive for membership entails.  

If someone wants to make the argument that we should collaborate with “moderate” Islamists in the way that Western governments tried to use unions and social democrats against communism, that is another debate, but we should appreciate that the reason why “moderate” Islamism will be successful in depriving jihadis of recruits and political strength is that it will also be offering a similar future vision of a state governed in the name of Islam.  A party like AK might help to counteract the temptation of violent political action, but it will do so because it offers another means to the same general goals. 

However, a sizeable, powerful minority in Turkey does not want to see what AK will become and this minority can and will stop it from happening.  For them, any political Islam is really too much, and I don’t really blame them.  In the Turkish case, the question of whether AK can manage the contradictions between political Islam and democratic norms is purely academic, since Turkey does not have regular democratic norms in the first place (a consequence of the repressive speech laws instituted by the Kemalists) and the army will never permit the experiment to last for very long.