ANKARA: After four decades of Turkish waiting, it is a devout Muslim with Islamist roots who has clinched the country's dream of European Union entry talks.
Turkey's secularist establishment is deeply wary of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, jailed for four months in the 1990s for reciting a poem judged to be an incitement to religious hatred.
Opponents say his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which swept to power in 2002 on a wave of voter disgust with the political old guard, nurtures a hidden Islamist agenda.
Yet it is his all-out reform drive to meet EU criteria on democracy, human rights and the rule of law that has won Turkey its coveted start date next October for talks to join the bloc - a process that many say can only strengthen the secular basis of the modern Turkish Republic.
"It's a great success for him personally ... He will be recognized as the Turkish leader who managed to open this door," one Ankara-based EU diplomat said. "When you hold him next to his opponents, against the alternatives, he sticks out as a very remarkable leader."
Relatively poor, mainly Muslim Turkey has been courting the EU since 1963, yet its bad human rights record and political and economic instability meant it only became a candidate in 1999.
Friday's historic deal, thrashed out in hours of last-minute brinkmanship over whether Turkey would recognize the Greek Cypriot government of Cyprus, is a personal triumph for Erdogan.
He has largely staked his own reputation and that of his AKP on convincing the EU that Turkey is ready to start negotiating entry to a bloc many Turks suspect of being a Christian club.
Yet he made clear he would walk away if he felt the terms were unacceptable to Turkey, and diplomats said his cool head in the face of huge pressure helped forge a working compromise.
REFORMIST: The son of a poor sea captain, Erdogan hails from a tough part of Istanbul where he sold stale bread rolls as a boy to pay for school. A man with a taste for tailored suits who eschews alcohol, he cultivates a reputation as a bluff, radical champion of those who have suffered Turkey's economic crises.
That image - fans call it charisma, detractors call it populism - won the AKP an overwhelming victory in polls that devastated mainstream parties. The AKP, which sprang from a banned Islamist party, calls itself conservative and denies it wants to erode the secular nature of the state founded some 80 years ago by reformist Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the ashes of the Ottoman empire.
It has pushed through a swathe of EU-inspired reforms including abolishing the death sentence, cracking down on torture, increasing cultural rights for Kurds and other minorities and curbing the political power of Turkey's military.
Erdogan's reforms and his devout religious beliefs make him an object of deep suspicion among a Turkish administrative, judicial and military elite that has clung tenaciously to tenets of Turkish nationalism they believe spring from Ataturk himself.
The military in particular is in the paradoxical position of fearing the liberal reforms needed to join the EU will prevent it fighting Kurdish separatism in the south-east of the country, yet seeing EU accession as a bulwark against an Islamist menace. But Erdogan is keen to play up Turkey as a literal and metaphorical bridge between West and East, at a time when ties between the Christian and Muslim worlds are dogged by mistrust.
"Turkey ... feels its relationship with the EU is a project in civilizations," Erdogan told reporters in Brussels on Friday. "It is a project of peace and cooperation. (The EU) is not a Christian club. It is a union of values." -Reuters
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