Sarkozy Elected, Gul Withdraws

The son of Hungarian immigrants wins the highest office of a country whose politics have been marked by cultural anxiety and xenophobia in recent years. He campaigned on revitalizing the French economy and on the tough-guy image he garnered in his response to the immigrant slum riots of 2005, and won 53-47 in an election for which 85 percent of voters turned out. In his victory speech, he made peace offerings both to the Muslim minorities and to his new “American friends”.

Jacques Chirac is out, George W. Bush is an über-lame duck, and Tony Blair will soon be replaced by Gordon Brown*. The dynamics of the Atlantic alliance will be changing rapidly over the next 18 months; let’s hope it’s a period characterized by a bit more amity than we’re used to, eh?

Meanwhile, Geoffrey Wheatcroft at Slate points out that the French election and the Turkish presidential mess have big implications for one another – foremost among them that Turkey won’t be admitted to the European Union anytime soon. Abdullah Gul, the leader of the country’s pseudo-Islamist party and (inexplicably) a candidate whom no one is running against, withdrew his candidacy after a second parliamentary vote failed to produce a quorum. The Turkish military has a long tradition of not tolerating religious politics – it’s launched four pro-secular coups since 1960, the most recent in 1997 – and despite the highly-publicized protest last week, the general consensus seems to be that the bulk of the pressure to keep Gul out of office is coming from the ranks and not from the streets.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a greater advocate for secular politics than me, and my sympathy lies squarely with my secular Turkish comrades who are navigating the current crisis through democratic channels. But democracy means democracy, even if we don’t like the result. Religious chauvinism is a threat to any modern society, but it can’t violate secular legal tradition until it has the opportunity to wield state power; and until it does violate a bedrock secular institution, it can’t legitimately be denied the power the Turkish people have given it. Political Islamism is cringe-worthy even in its dilute, cryptic Turkish form, but military thuggery of this kind is a shamefully furtive and universally repugnant thing.

(*Yes, this did originally read "Gordon Smith", and I have yet again revealed my deep-set and reticent ignorance of the world outside America's borders. For shame, Kaasa.)