TURKEY'S JUDICIAL establishment, to the relief of its government and the country's European friends, has pulled back from the brink. The Constitutional Court's decision on Wednesday not to close the country's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) should bring a welcome end to months of political uncertainty, and marks an important landmark in the ongoing struggle to reconcile secularism with democracy. The ruling will also weaken the position of those determined to keep Turkey at arm's length from the European Union.
Following the government's attempt to ease the ban on headscarves in universities, the state prosecutor had charged the Islamist-rooted AKP with engaging in anti-secular activities, and wanted the party banned and leaders, including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, barred from politics for five years. But the court, set up by the military after the 1960 coup to defend the country's secular state, failed to agree a ban by the required 7-4 majority, deciding instead to deprive the party of some of its state funding. More than 20 parties have been banned for Islamist or Kurdish separatist activities over the years, including the AKP's predecessor in 2001, but none has been as popular as the governing party.
Mr Erdogan, his Islamist background notwithstanding, has worked to establish the AKP's credentials as a modern, economically conservative, pro-western party, committed to the modernisation and liberalisation that EU membership requires of Turkey. The party, which has presided over strong economic growth, won 47 per cent of the vote last year and controls most of the country's major cities. The prime minister, who has admitted "mistakes", appears also to have reached a modus vivendi with the powerful military, a pillar of the secularist establishment, although at the price of giving the generals a free hand in the war on the Kurdish PKK.
The court's ruling will not end the acute tension between the AKP and secularists suspicious of its intentions - in effect it is a warning shot across its bow. And it takes place against the background of charges being laid against more than 90 conspirators in what is alleged to have been a major plot by a shadowy right-wing group, Ergenekon, linked to former officers, to stir up social disorder and provoke a military coup to "restore order", like those in 1960 and 1980.
But times have changed. A confident and modernising Turkey has moved on and is slowly struggling to find a new political equilibrium. The court's decision is an important affirmation of that possibility.