Turkish PM says row over president will be resolved
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday, one day after his party's landslide re-election victory, that a critical row over Turkey's next president could be resolved without tension.
He also told a televised news conference he would discuss with Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul whether Gul would remain the ruling AK Party's candidate for the presidency.
Gul's candidacy in April plunged Turkey into crisis after the powerful secular elite, including army generals, objected to his Islamist past.
Erdogan defused that crisis by calling an early parliamentary election in which his centre-right AK Party won 47 percent of the vote, or 340 seats in the 550-seat assembly.
"We will resolve this matter (of the presidential election) without causing tensions," Erdogan said after talks with outgoing President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a staunch secularist.
"Gul's own wishes and thoughts are very important to me. We will hold discussions on the issue."
In Turkey, parliament elects the head of state for a seven-year term.
Sezer's term expired in May, but he was forced to stay on as caretaker following parliament's failure to elect a successor. The new assembly must now do so after it reconvenes next week.
The secularists also opposed Gul's candidacy because his wife wears the Muslim headscarf, viewed here as a threat to Turkey's strict separation of state and religion.
The Constitutional Court ruled that two thirds of MPs -- a very high threshold -- must be present in the parliamentary chamber during voting on the president, scuppering Gul's bid.
