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| Europe |
| Turkish PM under pressure to reconcile with secular opponents |
| 2008-08-01 |
| Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came under increased pressure on Thursday to reconcile with secular opponents after his Islamist-rooted party narrowly escaped being banned. In an almost unanimous appeal, newspapers urged Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to abandon religion-inspired policies and launch fresh democratic reforms to restore confidence that the AKP was not seeking an Islamist regime. "The ball is now in Erdogan's court," wrote the Milliyet newspaper, adding, "The prime minister should consider concrete steps - both on the government and party level - to eradicate people's worries," it said. The Constitutional Court on Wednesday narrowly rejected a bid to outlaw the AKP for undermining the secular system, punishing it with financial sanctions instead. The party was given a "serious warning" to respect secularism, said the court president. The judges told the AKP that its dissolution would become "inevitable" if it failed to toe the line, said former chief prosecutor Sabih Kanadoglu, who in 2001 successfully argued for the dissolution of an Islamist party. |
| Posted by:Fred |