The candidacy of Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s foreign minister, for the presidential elections provoked massive demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara and aborted the voting process. The confrontation is between secularists and a ruling party with a neo-Islamic tinge, the popular Justice and Development party (AKP), which has overseen a sophisticated, fast-improving economy and the nation’s candidacy for the European Union. The crisis arose from a contest for the soul of the nation, with nationalism at its core

A friend of mine, Ipek Calislar, couldn’t come to dinner the other night. She doesn’t have a car but she does have a police bodyguard and crossing from the other side of Istanbul on public transport would have been too complicated. She needed protection because of something that now affects many lives in Turkey and threatens many more. She didn’t testify against the mob, or blaspheme against any Islamic orthodoxy. She wrote a bestseller which was sold shrink-wrapped in plastic with an accompanying DVD. It offended not against God but against Turkey.

It was a biography of Latife Usakizade, briefly married to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and it elevated into a feminist heroine a woman whom official history had dismissed as a harridan who tried to steal Turkey’s founder from his one true love, the republic. The author described, among other surprises, how Latife cannily saved her husband from waiting assassins by swapping clothes; she donned his uniform and he a black chador. The idea that the father of today’s secular state a) did not laugh at death, b) dressed in women’s clothing and c) religious drag at that, was too much for some, who applied to the public prosecutor to open an investigation.

The case against Calislar, under article 5816, which is designed to protect Ataturk’s reputation, was feeble and collapsed last December, as you would expect in a country determined to break into the European Union. Calislar is among several Turkish authors who have been unsuccessfully pursued under statutes which many inside government find embarrassing. The prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, phoned to congratulate another friend of mine whose prosecution under article 301 of the penal code, forbidding insults to Turkishness, was dropped. As far as I know, he never phoned to commiserate with Hrant Dink, the Turkish Armenian editor who was given a suspended sentence under the same law. But to his credit, Erdogan did pay a condolence visit to Dink’s widow after a 17-year-old shot her husband dead in January.

His death is the reason that Calislar and others now have a police guard. It worries us all; when you ask how someone is, and they reply with a sigh and a shrug, you know exactly what they mean. When people ask who killed Dink, they don’t mean who pulled the trigger. The 17-year-old killer is now behind bars along with members of an ultra-right wing nationalist gang who sought to avenge the inaccurate headlines in the mainstream press claiming that Dink had “cursed the Turkishness in his blood”. The question really asks how far up the food chain the conspiracy went.

Turkey has a history of covert operations organised by an entrenched old guard who have manipulated ultra-nationalist gangs to get rid of Kurdish activists or create chaos when the elected government was going in a direction that the “deep state” didn’t approve. In 1996 a gangster, his moll, a chief of police and a pro-government Kurdish MP were in a car that ran into truck in the town of Susurluk, providing evidence of links between the security forces, politics and organised crime. Some suspect that Dink’s death was plotted by the same dark forces trying to discredit the government in this double election year.

The army speaks

The presidential election had once seemed a foregone conclusion. The rulingJustice and Development party (AKP), aware of the military’s distrust of its neo-Islamic tinge, had nominated the soft-spoken foreign minister Abdullah Gul for the post and, as parliament does the voting, the outcome had seemed in the bag. But the opposition, weak and divided and struggling to find its voice, chanced upon a clever tactic to sabotage the vote. They asserted, with no real precedent, that a quorum of three-quarters of MPs had to be in the chamber for the vote to proceed and took their objection to Turkey’s constitutional court. The court annulled the first round of voting on 1 May. After parliament again failed to elect Gul as president five days later, he withdrew his candidacy. The standoff between secularists and the AKP – provoking massive demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara – has opened the way for early general elections, from which the AKP is expected to emerge as the largest party. Whether it will have enough support to enact constitutional reform to enable direct elections for the presidency remains to be seen.

The constitutional court had seemed to be consulting the political weather vane as closely as its law books. The Friday before its decision, the military had taken the nation by surprise by posting on its website what amounted to an ultimatum to the government to abandon a presidential election which it said risked compromising the secular character of the republic. The Turkish chief of staff, General Yasar Buyukanit, had already hinted at what was to come in a rare press conference in Ankara on 13 April when he said that that he hoped the next president would not simply pay lip service to Turkey’s secular constitution but respect it to its core.

The military have always had a heavy hand in politics but it was neverlikely they would seize the radio station or put tanks on the streets. Turkey entered its worst economic crisis since the second world war in 2001 after a minister hurled a copy of the constitution at the now outgoing president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer. The army’s internet memorandum did not produce panic on the same scale. Turkey’s financial institutions and bill of economic health have radically improved after several years of fiscal prudence under the AKP (with direct foreign investment expected to reach $30bn this year). But many suspect that there would be a far worse crisis than in 2001 if the military started throwing its weight around more openly, and the military would have to take the blame for any dip in the economy.

It had been to avert just such a crisis that Erdogan had chosen not to stand as president himself. To avoid a confrontation with his own AKP party he chose Gul, a man liked and respected abroad, rather than a figure more appealing to Turkey’s secular elite; Gul’s wife wears an Islamic headscarf, the covering which the Kemalist hardline want to see banished from public life.

There is an unpleasant irony in the military’s resort to the worldwide web to express its views. The internet is the medium of choice for sending messages of hate, but ultra-nationalist rhetoric has seeped into popular culture in Rambo-style films and violent television series in which Turkish commandos in Iraq pursue sadistic American killers of women and children. To return to Hrant Dink, there is another explanation for his death that is more probable and just as worrying; that the ultra-right in Turkey has become a collection of ideologically committed cells more inspired by a sense of malaise than ordered by any rogue intelligence officer in green-tinted glasses. An al-Qaida-like quality of diffusion is implied.

Similar rhetoric blares from the press. Turkey’s most profitable newspaper, Hürriyet, has for years carried on its front page the motto “Turkey for the Turks” beneath a 1930s-style cameo of Ataturk (imagine the fuss if the Frankfurter Allgemeine ran “Deutschland für die Deutschen” on its masthead or The Times of London printed “Don’t try this unless you’re English” on the crossword page). Yet Hürriyet is Fox News-like in shameless flagwaving and was vociferous in targeting Dink. It snidely suggested that the novelist Orhan Pamuk was sympathetic to Armenians massacred in 1915 only to ingratiate himself with the Nobel literature prize committee.

A changing mood

One of the last times I saw Dink was at Pamuk’s trial in December 2005, a sinister event with a phalanx of ultra-nationalist lawyers parading into the overcrowded courtroom, claiming to represent the injured party – insulted Turkishness. They were being egged on by a noisy claque in the corridors and jeers in the street outside. Dink, there to show solidarity, was also threatened with prosecution and it was heart-breaking to watch so generous a man, who saw the decent side of everyone, provoke so much ignorant anger from the crowd.

I think he shrugged it off. Roughhouses are part of the job for writers in Turkey. I was prosecuted back in 1999 for a column for a Turkish language newspaper that was deemed to be insulting to the military. The offence carried a maximum six-year prison term and I recall the smiles and knowing pats on the back I received at a gathering of journalistic colleagues after the news broke. And the comments. “Prison A is passé and besides, the food’s better at prison B”… “They’re only trying you in the criminal court. I was tried in the state security court”… The case was dropped, but by then I had been through a ritual of fraternity hazing. A fellow American said kindly: “I know what it’s like to be unexpectedly rejected by a country you’ve begun to think of as home.” Puffing my chest, I replied: “You don’t understand. This is Turkey’s way of embracing me as its own.”

Even before Dink’s death the mood had changed and although prosecutions almost never end in conviction, they have become occasions for bullies to take to the streets. The police are defensive because of criticisms that they did nothing to protect Dink, while some might have sympathised with the motives of his killer (there is footage of the arresting officers having themselves photographed next to him as if he were a celebrity). So they now assign guards to anyone who might remotely be in the ultra-nationalists’ sights.

A retired colonel, Fikri Karadag, told me: “Hrant Dink had a very comfortable life here. It was only when he started badmouthing Turkishness that he got into trouble. He was victim of his own racism.” Karadag has been in the news recently after organising a nationwide patriotic league that seems more like a network of vigilantes. Its members swear an oath upon a Qur’an and a gun (“It’s only an air pistol”). It is named after the Kuvay-i Milliye (national forces), local resistance units that fought against invading Greek armies after the Ottoman empire failed as a state at the end of the first world war. Karadag and many like him would like to fight Turkey’s 1919-22 war of liberation again.

Ultra-nationalist views

The enemies this time would include the US (come to divide Turkey by creating havoc in Iraq), Zionists, imperialists, wealthy Turks who sell their country short then smuggle the profits abroad, Europeans talking a lot about human rights – and religious zealots with their scruffy beards and headscarved wives. “What happiness to the one who says ‘I am a Turk’ ” is the Ataturk adage posted in the Kuvay-i Milliye Association’s HQ, but there is little that is happy about Karadag’s vision of the world. We briefly argued after I questioned his assertion that the Prophet Muhammad had really been a member of a Turkic tribe. Karadag has no time for the current government, which he sees as a US ploy to promote its own brand of Muslim politics and implement its vision of a Greater Middle East.

He also felt passionately that the Iraqi city of Kirkuk has always been Turkmen and that it is being ethnically scrubbed by the US-backed Kurdish administration. He is certain that if a “sham” referendum to determine its administrative status goes ahead at the end of this year, Ankara will have no option but to go to war. Turkish elite troops have been based in the north of Iraq since before Saddam was ousted, so they won’t have far to go.

The temptation is to dismiss this as the posturing of a supremacist Ku Klux Klansman. But many of these attitudes have entered the political mainstream. Turkish hardline secularists take it for granted that the US is promoting Erdogan’s party as a moderate model for the rest of the Islamic world – despite the AKP’s refusal to allow the US to open a northern front from Turkish territory in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The AKP has also taken an independent line from Washington (or at least one closer to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report) since it believes it must keep a dialogue going with Tehran and Damascus. Erdogan recently did a little soccer diplomacy with Bashar Assad in a box at a Fenerbahçe-Al-Ittihad friendly match in Aleppo. It’s hard to imagine him at a Washington Nationals baseball game any time soon.

The AKP’s reputation for economic prudence won it the support of international markets. But it owes its popularity (30-40% of the electorate, far more than any other party and enough under the electoral system to give it a working parliamentary majority), not to backing from abroad but to the inability of preceding administrations to break a cycle of incompetence and corruption. The main opposition Republican People’s party is a member of the Socialist International, yet it is caught up in nationalist rhetoric and its policies are less New Left than antique. Those opposed to AKP dominance have only one weapon, the claim that they have the nation’s true interests at heart. The distant danger is that this will drag Turkey into a foreign adventure neither it nor the region can afford.

Closed session on Iraq

The day that Dink was buried in Istanbul, parliamentarians gathered in Ankara in a rare closed session. The meeting was so secret that the ushers were specially appointed deaf-mutes and no stenographer making a record was allowed to stay in the chamber for more than a few minutes. We do know the subject was Iraq, the key source of conflict between Turkey and the US and yet also the one issue on which they agree, since Ankara is afraid that Iraq will become a failed state or splinter into ethnic-based autonomous zones. An independent Kurdish entity would fuel irredentist claims to Turkey’s Kurdish population. Turkey does not want the US pull out of Iraq, it wants to see US troops deal with Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) members who shelter in the north of Iraq. The PKK’s power to foment rebellion was much diminished after their leader Abdullah Ocalan was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1999. The US is reluctant to offend its only reliable ally in Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds, or to add to the list of enemies by going against the PKK.

Parliament would also have discussed the status of oil-rich Kirkuk. Ankara fears that if Kirkuk opts to join the Kurdish administration, this would precipitate Iraqi Kurdish independence. No one really expects the Turkish army to go in – but how, in such a charged atmosphere, can it beat a retreat?

At his 13 April press conference General Buyukanit had urged the government to give him the political licence to deal with the PKK in northern Iraq. He said, more or less, we can do it, we want to do it and we think it’s worth the trouble, but it would have to be a political not a military decision to invade Iraq. Even though the armed forces have in the past launched hot pursuit operations across the borders, Buyukanit believed it was now up to parliament to legitimate such an operation. He did not mention that this diplomatic decision would require the tacit support of Turkey’s most powerful ally, the US, whose troops are in Iraq. The Turkish military has previously issued warnings against its government safe in the knowledge that it had the Pentagon’s support. This time it appeared to be telling the politicians to be wary of the US.

A more serious challenge

The more serious challenge Turkey faces is not on its borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria, but in its relationship with Europe. Nationalism has become a potent force just when Ankara has been fighting for the right to negotiate away its sovereignty in accession talks with the European Union. Those inside the EU who complain of the tyranny of Brussels are surprised that many Turks still think membership promises better rule. EU accession not only appeals to the Ataturk dream of modernisation, but has an instruction manual (the 80,000 page EU treaty, the acquis communautaire) on how to modernise. Just the proposal for EU membership has helped transform Turkish economy and society, but not everyone feels a beneficiary of more liberal trade and free flow of ideas. There is a rearguard alliance of those who’ve had enough already.

Turkish ultra-nationalists are more than Eurosceptics. They are sceptical about the whole world. Their watchword is that “Turks have no friends other than themselves”, which they try to make into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The strategy is less to convince Turks to renounce Europe than to act in such a way, including prosecuting noted authors, that Europe will reject Turkey first, so that they can capitalise on the resultant resentment. Many in the Brussels bureaucracy refuse to join the game but a new crop of anti-enlargement and anti-immigrant European politicians, led by French presidential candidate Nicholas Sarkozy, are willing to play. German Christian Democrats ask in stage whispers whether Muslim Turks can ever be European in the same way that US neo-conservatives ask if Muslims can ever be democratic. It’s the wrong question. It’s not the Islamists who are scary but the nationalists. Like the remnants of the communist parties in eastern and central Europe they mourn the passing of the cold war and fear the changes ahead.

In this Turkish election year, progress with Europe is on hold. No Turkish politician wants to be seen to be seeking admission to a club that treats its application without enthusiasm. The political reality is that no one in Turkey, including the military, wants to take the blame for officially scuppering the European project. Even the far-right National Action party ceded to EU pressure in 2002 while serving in a coalition that abolished the death penalty, thus saving the life of Ocalan.

As has happened in Central Europe, the big boost to the economy is in the run-up to membership, not when the country has to abide by all those expensive rules. The Turkish economy is mending nicely after the economic crises that helped bring the current government to power. Foreign banks from Citicorps to Paribas are falling over themselves to grab a Turkish partner, lured by the prospect of business as this economy of more than 70 million people grows. From their perspective Turkey is already inside the Euro-economy since Turkey has had a customs union with the EU for more than a decade and manufactured goods already go in and out duty free.

“It would take three to four years to complete all the technical negotiations,” said Ali Babacan, an economics minister who is in charge of talks with Brussels, although he knows that Turkey cannot enter the promised land for another decade at least. As a politician he measures time by how often key member states have to go to the polls before it is necessary to sign off on Turkish admission. In some countries, that would be two or three governments from now.

The mood is insecurity

Insecurity is therefore the mood in Turkey. It was accustomed to deference during the cold war, when it bartered its strategic importance for yet another standby agreement with the International Monetary Fund which it had no intention of keeping. I estimate that the cold war (and its security) ended late for Turkey, on 1 March 2003, when it renounced its military importance as its parliament voted to refuse US troops invading Iraq access through its territory. Europe has since turned in on itself while the US thrashes about in Iraq, with perhaps Iran and Syria next.

Turkish secularists are nervous that a new Islamic-leaning political elite may be transforming society. The massive demonstrations by Turkish secularists, first in Ankara and then at the end of April in Istanbul, were not so much Nuremberg rallies as a show of solidarity in the face of forces they are struggling to understand. The military chiefs who squirm at the sight of a headscarf in public life are reacting like some US colonel whose daughter’s boyfriend has long hair. And just like a teenager off to get a tattoo or a piercing, I am sure many wear a headscarf just to annoy.

At the same time, the Ankara and Istanbul demonstrations against the AKP’s control of the presidency will have had a cheering effect on Turkish secularists, encouraging them not to underestimate their own strength. Turkey consumes $1.5bn dollars worth of raki (the national tipple) a year and even more wine and beer. Its coastal cities rely on a summer tourist invasion of bikinied Finns, Spaniards and Czechs, with the big spenders being the Russians and the English. There is no enthusiasm for sharia law.

There are sensible and self-critical voices. Turkish liberals, followers of the country’s European vocation, believers in the power of civil society to move mountains and people’s minds, also have their battalions. “We realised we were not alone,” a professor friend said as she and a hundred thousand others, maybe more, walked the route of Dink’s cortege the day of his funeral. There were Kurdish dissidents, trade unionists, an ordinary mother and daughter who live near me. Why Dink’s life provoked so spontaneous a display is hard to say. He was respected for speaking out, and held in affection because you could see, even on television, that he spoke from the heart.

Many Turks want to talk openly about the past and he was brave enough to engage them in that conversation. People marched because they felt the bullies shouldn’t win. There is another story, an insight into a society that even at the most painful moments tries to do the decent thing. The father of Dink’s young assassin recognised the wanted photo on the television news as his son. He phoned the police.