The seven-year term of Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer was scheduled to expire on May 16, 2007, and parliament (the Grand National Assembly) was required to elect a successor by that date. Since November 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a party with Islamist roots which claims a conservative democratic orientation, controlled a comfortable majority in parliament, but its numbers fell short of the two-thirds needed to elect a president in the first and second rounds of a vote. Sezer, a former head of the Constitutional Court, is an ardent secularist who often vetoed AKP-proposed laws and appointments that he found conflicted with the founding nationalist and secularist principles of the state. Both the AKP and its secularist opponents understood that much was at stake in the choice of Sezer's replacement. On April 25, 2007, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan named Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul to be the AKP's candidate for president. In doing so, Erdogan appears to have severely misjudged his opposition, failed to provide sufficient time for thoughtful discussion, and contributed to one of the worst political crises in recent Turkish history. Gul is widely respected as an effective foreign minister who helped to secure the opening of Turkey's membership talks with the European Union (EU) in 2005 and worked to smooth relations with the United States. He promised to act according to secularist principles if elected president. Nonetheless, secularists considered him to be a controversial candidate partly because of his prominent role in two past, banned, Islamist parties and mainly because his wife wears a strictly Islamic head scarf covering all of her hair (called a turban in Turkey). Turkish women are prohibited from wearing the head scarf in public institutions, which President Sezer interpreted to include the presidential palace, Çankaya. Secularists view the head scarf as a symbol both of Islamism and of retrogression to a time before Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, imposed Westernizing reforms on the country in the 1920s and 1930s. As one of those reforms, Ataturk imported to Turkey the French concept of laicite , a stricter version of secularism than that practiced in the United States, to Turkey. Thus, because of Mrs. Gul's head scarf, the choice of a president became an emotional fight for the identity of the state. The opposition also argued that Erdogan's insistence on an AKP president threatened Turkey's balance of powers. The AKP already controlled the prime ministry and parliament. The presidency would allow it to dominate other branches of government because of the president's power to appoint the Chief of Staff of the armed forces, Constitutional Court judges, the Higher Education Board, and university rectors—all still bastions of secularism. The President also has substantial veto powers. President Sezer vetoed other high level government appointments liberally to prevent the AKP from achieving control over more levers of state power in the bureaucracy and vetoed some legislation, thereby delaying AKP's pursuit of both its reform and religion-favoring agendas. A counter-argument maintained that if AKP elected a president, then the voters could have restored the balance of power by denying the party a mandate in national elections then scheduled to be held in November 2007. From this perspective, the secularists did not need to provoke a crisis over the election of a president to preserve the balance of power. They simply had to win the parliamentary elections. This argument might lead to the conclusion that the opposition lacked confidence in its ability to defeat AKP at the polls and chose other, some would say less democratic, means to achieve this goal. To some extent, the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) is a party of the armed forces, bureaucracy, legal system, and academe, in other words the historic secular elite, fighting to retain its powers. On the other side is the AKP, a party of the aspiring lower and new middle and upper classes, seeking to expand their powers. The Republican People's Party (CHP), Ataturk's party, champion of secularism, and the main opposition party in parliament, had called on Erdogan to choose a "consensus" candidate for president and criticized him for not consulting before nominating Gul. Yet, following traditional practice of allowing the majority party to present a candidate, CHP never suggested a consensus candidate or named its own candidate for the presidency. Even before Erdogan's nomination of Gul, CHP leader Deniz Baykal had urged other parties in parliament to boycott the first round of the vote for president in order to deprive the AKP of the votes required to elect its candidate and to force early national elections. Secularist non-governmental organizations had begun mobilizing with a mass protest in Ankara on April 14, then targeting a possible Erdogan presidential candidacy. After the Gul nomination, unprecedentedly large demonstrations followed in major cities and some other urban areas against what participants viewed as a threat of AKP dominance. On April 27, parliament convened for the first round of voting to elect a president. Under the Constitution, two-thirds or 367 votes from 550 Members of Parliament are required to elect a president in the first two rounds. A majority or 276 votes are required in third and fourth rounds. Early parliamentary elections ensue if the legislators are unable to elect a president. AKP held 353 seats; Gul received 357 votes with 361 deputies present. CHP argued that a quorum of 367 attendees was required for the first round to be valid; it boycotted the vote in order to render it invalid. CHP then petitioned the Constitutional Court to nullify the vote. The Turkish military founded the modern Turkish Republic, views itself as the protector of the Republic and its secular principles, and has been instrumental in the ouster of four civilian governments since 1960. The armed forces oversaw the drafting of the current constitution after a 1980 coup. The AKP government has passed reforms to diminish the role of the military and to comply with European Union (EU) demands for civilian control over the military. Yet, the military remains the most respected institution in Turkey with considerable influence over non-military matters. It has defined the major threats to the state as separatism and "reactionism" or Islamic fundamentalism. Many observers believed that the military would not silently permit the AKP, with its Islamist origins, to elect one of its own as the next president. Some secularists appeared to wish openly that the military would intervene in the process. Chief of the General Staff General Yasar Buyukanit issued a clear warning to the AKP on April 12, when he expressed hope that a new president would be committed to secularism "not in words but in essence." Then, shortly before midnight on April 27, after the first round of the presidential election, the website of the Office of the Chief of the General Staff carried a message, stating "it must not be forgotten that the Turkish Armed Forces ... are the sure and certain defenders of secularism.... (T)hey will make their position and stance perfectly clear as needs be. Let nobody have any doubt about this." The posting also described local public events with fundamentalist overtones that it called "an open challenge to the state, in the apparel of religion." In the past, Turkish governments had resigned in response to such warnings. The AKP did not. Instead, the government spokesman reacted strongly to what he described as the "inappropriate" General Staff statement. He declared, "The General Staff is an establishment under the Prime Minister's Office. It would be inconceivable if the General Staff in a democracy upholding the rule of law made a statement critical of the government about any issue...." He also asserted that the statement was an attempt to influence the Constitutional Court. Some suggested that the military's intervention may not have ended with its April 27 message, noting that months passed after a similar demarche in 1979 led to a coup in September 1980. Others considered the message itself to be an unacceptable "e-mail coup." On May 1, the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election on the grounds that a required two-thirds quorum was not present. President Sezer had appointed many of the Court's members and the Court is seen as a voice of the secular establishment. It probably did not need the military's prompting to reach its decision, although the military was held responsible for the result. The AKP and others viewed the ruling as a political one; Erdogan described it as "a bullet aimed at democracy." The government said, however, that it would respect the decision. Some have compared the Court's decision and the controversy over it to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 2000 presidential race. After failing to attain the newly prescribed quorum in parliament for a replay of the first round of the vote for president, Prime Minister Erdogan called for early national elections. He also proposed constitutional amendments to provide for the direct election of the president in two rounds, a five-year presidential term with the possibility of a reelection (instead of the current single seven-year term), a reduction in the term of parliament from five years to four, definition of the parliamentary quorum at 184 for both sessions and elections, and a lowering of the age of eligibility for Members of Parliament to 25. Parliament endorsed the amendments on May 7. President Sezer vetoed them on May 25, declaring that a directly elected president would "create problems for the regime." He suggested that it would be better if the amendments were debated in public and then discussed in parliament. As expected, however, parliament passed the amendments again in the same form on June 1. The Constitution did not allow Sezer to veto them a second time. On June 18, he referred the amendments for publication to be presented to a national referendum to be held 120 days thereafter; at the same time, he petitioned the Constitutional Court to invalidate the amendment package.