Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul was elected Turkey's next president on Tuesday, the first Islamist to take the post in the secular country. "Abdullah Gul in the third round obtained an absolute majority and was elected the 11th president of Turkey with 339 votes," parliament speaker Koksal Toptan said after the vote.
Gul, the country's current foreign minister, won the third round vote Tuesday at the Turkish parliament in Ankara. He is expected to take over from current incumbent President Ahmet Necdet Sezer later in the day, The Associated Press reported.
In May, Gul's bid for presidency was blocked in a legal maneuver, owing to the perception by the secular elite of him as too Islamic for such a high-ranking position, largely on account of his wife wearing a headscarf.
On Monday, Turkey's top military chief warned that the division between religion and the state was being threatened by "centers of evil." "Our nation has been watching the behavior of those separatists who can't embrace Turkey's unitary nature, and centers of evil that systematically try to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic," said General Yasar Buyukanit in a note, posted on the military's Web site.
