ANKARA: Turkey’s new president Abdullah Gul will be walking a political tightrope, balancing between pressure from army-backed secularists who mistrust him for his Islamist past and conservative supporters who seek broader religious freedoms, analysts said on Tuesday.

The generals, who see themselves as the guardians of Turkey’s secular system, sent a strong signal that they are unhappy with Gul’s presidency when they snubbed his oath-taking ceremony on Tuesday.

The unprecedented gesture followed a warning by the military on the eve of the parliamentary vote for president that “centres of evil are trying to systematically erode” this mainly Muslim country’s secular system.

“These are signs that the climate of confrontation is not over,” senior journalist Fikret Bila commented. “Gul is aware of the problems and will work to overcome them.” “If the warnings, particularly from the military, are underestimated, the consequences will not be good.... The political leadership should consider moves to dispel the suspicions,” political scientist Hikmet Ozdemir said.

The Turkish military has unseated four governments in as many decades, the last time in 1997, when it forced the resignation of the country’s first Islamist-led government of which Gul was a member.

The main opposition Republican People’s Party, a key player in the crisis that blocked Gul’s first presidential bid in April, was also absent from the inauguration, as were several judges and the head of Turkey’s top academic board.

Opponents fear that the Islamist-rooted ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), to which Gul belonged until he became president and must be impartial, would now seek to erode the separation of mosque and state as the AKP controls the country’s top civilian posts.

“Gul’s primary task will be to win the hearts and minds of those who mistrust him, but he cannot overcome this polarisation by himself if all sectors of society are not open to reconciliation,” political commentator Rusen Cakir said.

Gul has already made conciliatory gestures, analysts said, pointing to his repeated pledges to uphold secularism and the fact that his wife Hayrunnisa, whose Islamic headscarf irritates secularists, did not attend Tuesday’s ceremonies.

In his inaugural speech, Gul, who had been foreign minister since 2003, pledged to protect the separation of state and religion, but stressed that secularism also guarantees religious freedoms.

Conservative Turks, who form the backbone of the AKP electorate, complain that the official interpretation of secularism is too rigid and that simple pious people are often stigmatised as Islamist radicals who aspire to an Iranian-style regime.

At the core of their resentment is a ban on the headscarf in government offices and universities, which they say is a violation of freedom of conscience and the right to education.

The virulent secularist objections to Hayrunnisa Gul as Turkey’s first lady have “offended” all Turkish women who wear a headscarf, Asli Aydintasbas wrote in the mass-circulation Sabah newspaper.

“A process of normalisation must now begin on the headscarf issue to end the ‘leper’ status of 50 per cent of Turkish women who have chosen to cover up in one way or another,” she said.

Despite protests that he was going too far, previous president Ahmet Necdet Sezer refused to invite women wearing the headscarf to receptions at the presidential palace, thus snubbing most AKP wives.

Cakir warned that Gul would also grapple with pressure from militant Islamists expecting the new president to openly manifest religious attitudes.

“The different social sectors that backed Gul have different expectations,” he said. “Some conservatives among them could have feelings of revenge and see the presidential palace as a place for the voice of Islam to rise.”—AFP