Abdullah Gül is president of Turkey - against the will of the army - By Michael Thumann

The election of Abdullah Gül as president of Turkey was able to take place because of three changes that have radically altered Turkey in recent years: The new role of the military, the revived and strengthened opposition to them and the Kemalist elite, and the changing needs of the people.

Some considered it a provocation of historic proportions when Abdullah Gül, a devout Muslim, became Turkey's president. In April, the army leadership shocked Turkey's political class with a memorandum trying to prevent the election of the ex-Islamist and former foreign minister as president. Now the generals have to watch as Gül occupies the presidential palace of Çankaya and with it, the seat of the republic's legendary founder Kemal Atatürk.

Gül will be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, guiding figure of the judiciary, chairman of the National Security Council, protector of the state, custodian of the flag and the secular order of Turkey. This is a political earthquake. Why do Turkey's once-dominant military appear to be powerless? Why couldn't they prevent Gül's rise? Will they attempt a coup d'état?

One needs not look far into the past - only to the military coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 - to gain a sense of the Turkish army's fondness for intervention. Even into the 1990s, the army dictated the conditions under which Turkish politicians were allowed to simulate democracy. It was the generals who drafted the constitution anyhow.

The war against the Kurdish PKK guerrillas and secular leftist militant groups were not the concern of the prime minister or a civilian minister of defense but that of the generals. The Kemalist bureaucrats loyal to the army enforced criminal law, some of which derived from Turkey's pre-democratic era, and was often discriminatory statutes aimed at minorities such as Kurds and Christians. Meanwhile, politicians struggled to keep their fragile coalitions intact.

The armed forces are not simply Turkey's army. They keep watch over the secular republic that Atatürk forged. They define the secular orientation of the government. They preserve political and social order in the country. The government is in civilian hands but the custodial role of the army allows interventions into political life at any time, far beyond just military issues. The armed forces still consider this as their role.

Besides the Kurds, the generals saw the Islamists as their worst enemy. The electoral victory of Necmettin Erbakan, the father of Turkish Islamism, quickly wore out the military's patience. His Welfare Party (RP) and its religious political program were enough on their own. But watching the prime minister then also make diplomatic overtures toward Iran was soon too much for the generals. In a coup d'état - without tanks but with plenty of behind-the-scenes pressure - Erbakan was forced out of office in 1997.

So failed the experiment of political Islam at the top in Turkey. Erbakan has learned little since then. His Felicity Party (SP) is still fishing for votes in the Islamist spectrum but without much success. In the most recent election, the Islamists received just 2.3 percent of the vote. However, the young conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) took the absolute majority with 46.7 percent of the vote.

This contrast testifies to a revolution in the party landscape that is narrowing the army's role ever more tightly. The political adversaries of the strictly secular, occasionally militant Kemalist camp have modernized and completely repositioned themselves. The new Turkish president, Gül, exemplifies this transformation, which is why it's worth taking a quick look at his career.

Gül was in jail during the army's 1980 coup d'état. Later, he worked at the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia during the 1980s, in order to evade the generals. His political career began in Erbakan's SP, becoming the government's spokesperson in 1996. But then came the next coup d'état. After the army cleared out the religious government, Gül reconsidered his options.

Erbakan was surprised when Gül suddenly led an in-party rebellion against him, only to later abandon the party with a smile. With maverick Islamist and present-day Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, Gül founded a new party in 2001, the conservative, but no longer Islamist, AKP. They won an absolute majority in the 2002 election.

Gül and Erdogan kept the AKP's government program free from references to Sharia law and other Islamic symbolism. In fact, there was no more talk of religion at all. Instead, economics, pragmatism and EU membership negotiations were what counted. Gül and Erdogan reformed and modernized the country. They led Turkey out of its self-imposed isolation and repaired its damaged or even destroyed relationships with almost all of its neighbors.

In Brussels and Ankara, the duo fought to get Turkey back on track for membership negotiations. In October 2005, the EU states officially decided to begin accession talks with Turkey. These two ex-Islamist, conservative, reform politicians succeeded where the secular and putatively pro-Western parties failed. They pushed open the door to the EU.

Preconditions for this historic decision included reforms that limited the role of the army and threatened its political status. New criminal codes limited the possibilities for the Kemalist judiciary to hand down arbitrary verdicts. To the army's consternation, the Kurds in southeast Anatolia have been allowed to broadcast in their own language and the rights of Christians have been cautiously expanded.

Gül's Kemalist predecessor, President Ahmet Sezer, blocked some of the measures. He could not stop the EU-stipulated reform of Turkey's National Security Council - the body that allowed the military's pulling of political strings - that was willingly passed by the AKP. The EU demanded that a civilian lead the council and the number of its meetings be halved. The army grudgingly acquiesced.

Back in 2003, the generals had to accept that, for the first time in Turkish history, the parliament decided a central question of Turkish security policy. Then, the United States requested permission for its ground troops to march into Iraq through Turkey. The freely elected representatives declined the request. As a result, the U.S. was forced to invade Iraq solely from the south. Ankara's relationship with Washington deteriorated, as did those between the armed forces of both countries.

Still, for the Turks, that moment was the one in which the Turkish parliament had bared its teeth for the first time and dared try more democracy. That brings us to the country's most important change since the dawn of the new millennium - the Turks have gained more willpower, are more self-confident in the face of the state and even with respect to the army. The latter still enjoys high levels of popularity but no longer as the watchdog of a punitive state.

While the army could always be sure of the people's support during the 1960, 1971 and 1980 coups, the placards of the Kemalist demonstrations in April against Gül told a strikingly different story - "Neither Sharia nor coup d'état!" they read. In fact, substantial parts of the secular establishment rejected a violent response by the army to these unwelcome political events.

Even strictly secular Turks prefer economic success, political stability and a good international reputation for their country to an isolationist fortress mentality. With the elections on July 22, the population of Turkey ultimately revealed what they thought of the army's threats against the AKP government in April - every second voter opted for the AKP which returned to parliament with an absolute majority.

It is these three profound changes in Turkey that the armed forces can no longer ignore. Their new commander-in-chief is Gül, the ex-Islamist renegade and pro-European reformer. Nobody can rule out the possibility that the army could revolt against this new constellation of power. It might prevail militarily. But it would have to prepare for another historic defeat.