"The Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has finally taken opinion polls and pressure on the street into account", underlines the daily. "He has given up his dream out of pragmatism and under pressure from his own party which is afraid of losing the legislative elections in November, afraid of the army, which has expressed its discomfort, and afraid of the secular population who gathered a demonstration of one and a half million people against him. To stymie fear of the Islamisation of the country, Gül has promised to respect the values of the democratic and secular Republic. This 56 year-old economist educated in Britain was a key actor in negotiations with the EU. However, the fact that his wife Hayrusina permanently covers her head with a veil, something that is one of Turkey's most controversial issues, may well cause trouble for him." (25/04/2007)

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"By putting forward Abdullah Gül, the foreign minister, Mr Erdogan and the AKP have stepped back from confrontation at a time of rising political tension. Hopefully this will tone down Turkey's culture war before it gets really dangerous", considers the daily. "The army, still powerful though curbed by AKP reforms, is flexing its muscles. ... The 'deep state' the army fronts for will fear Mr Gül is keeping the presidential seat warm for Mr Erdogan. ... Yet the tussle for the presidency, which led to big demonstrations, suggests that in future Turkish heads of state should be elected directly by the people, the only way Mr Erdogan is likely to become (and stay) president. The AKP high command is already mulling changes in the presidential system. This needs a wider debate about the distribution of power between institutions, including excessive presidential powers that have more to do with the 1980 army coup than Atatürk." (25/04/2007)

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According to Edgar Auth, it was a clever move of Prime Minister Erdogan to make way for his fellow party member Abdullah Gül to run for the highest public office: "It's no coincidence that the proponents of the Islamisation of Turkey are not opposed to the country's coming closer to Europe. This is because the tolerance and openness practised there will make things easier for them. Unlike at European universities, students at Turkish universities are forbidden to wear headscarves... The allegedly so enlightened elites in Istanbul and Ankara see the roots of re-Islamisation in Europe. In their view fundamentalist emigrants are reimporting Islamism to their country. This elite tends to overlook its own social and democratic shortcomings. This situation is creating a somewhat unholy alliance between the military, the nationalists and concerned democrats who see an AKP presidency as the end of modern Turkey... This should give cause for scepticism... Therefore Gül and his party should be given a chance." (25/04/2007)

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Christoph Prantner takes a critical view of Abdullah Gül's presidential candidacy: "Although Gül stresses that the president is bound by Turkey's secular foundations and that he would naturally respect this, it's clear that if he's elected there would be major changes in Turkey's institutional structure. Not since Atatuk founded the republic would an Islamic party have so much power, occupying the offices of president, prime minister and speaker of the parliament at the same time. Never before has an 'Islamic' president had the military, which sees itself as the protector of Kemalism, under its command. And never has an Islamic politician been able to influence universities and the selection of the functionaries of justice to such an extent. If the AKP wins the parliamentary elections in November again, we will learn the truth about how deeply rooted laicism is in Turkey." (25/04/2007)

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The integration of Muslims will be discussed at the second meeting of the Islam Conference in Germany. Necla Kelek takes the opportunity to examine the different approaches to reforming Islam and formulates her main criticism of the religion: "In its 1400-year history, Islam has hardly taken root in Europe. Islam is an Arabic religion, even if it presents itself as universal. It doesn't recognise individuality and its view of mankind is incompatible with modern times, which require independent individuals. Islam pursues a very different, collective social model. Islam not only claims to be a faith; as a religion it represents the unity of life, belief, laws and politics. It's in direct conflict with secularisation. Islam tries to demand collective rights from its followers, whereas an enlightened society protects the rights of the individual above all else." (25/04/2007)

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More from the press review on the subject » Religion, » Migration, » Integration, » Weltanschauung, » Germany
All available articles from » Necla Kelek

In an interview given to Gilles Anquetil and François Armanet, the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk refuses to "separate Europe from the 'Europeanism' of communism. After all, communism is a purely European reality. It is here that it was first conceived and it was indeed here that it was put to the test. It cannot be said that 'you had communism and we had Europe'. This is one more iron curtain in the European consciousness - the belief that communism was elsewhere. It was here, with us in Europe, and in this sense it is part of the same national heritage as the Renaissance, the baroque, the chateaux of the Loire Valley, etc. ... Since the happy event of the fall of the Soviets, we simply have a Europe that stretches from Kiev to Lisbon, from Tallinn to Tirana, and that's that. The Albanian Europeanism of Tirana is worth just as much as that of Luxemburg, for example, though the former is considerably more colourful." (25/04/2007)

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All available articles from » Andrzej Stasiuk, » Gilles Anquetil, » François Armanet

The editorialist Aldo Rizzo wants Italy to push the United Nations to concretely intervene in the Darfur region in southern Sudan, where the armed conflict between the Khartoum government and Arab militia has caused more than 200,000 deaths and 2 million displacements in four years. "The EU is discussing which horrible past events can be defined as 'genocide'. But it would be useful to actively deal with the present, not only to condemn devastating actions, but to stop them from becoming irreparable. Of course there is no lack of international attention given to the subject of Darfur, but it has become a game of realpolitik for the mighty powers ... . Italy is currently a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Highly praised for its campaign against the death penalty, it would gain even more applause for proposing a concrete initiative for places that host death on a massive scale". (25/04/2007)

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All available articles from » Aldo Rizzo

On May 20th Romanians are due to speak out in a referendum on the suspension of their president Traian Basescu who has just been discharged by Parliament. For Gérard Delaloye, a historian and journalist, this crisis highlights how urgent it is for the way the country functions politically to be modified. "The Romanian political class ... cannot be spared a drastic revision of the Constitution without plunging the country into anarchy or dictatorship. Furthermore, the current crisis also rests on the exorbitant power of members of parliament, deputies and senators. The electoral system, directly inspired by the communist regime is based on a list ballot of proportional representation where the elected representatives are chosen by the parties, not the voters. Thus, over fifteen years, a parliamentary autocracy has been created which serves its own interests when it is not obsequiously pandering to those of the oligarchs, its backers." (24/04/2007)

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Not only the French, but the Romanians, too, are in the process of electing a new president, notes Cristian Pirvulescu: "French democracy has been revitalised. The victories of the two candidates Sarkozy and Royal were to be expected, but the voter turnout is proof that French democracy is in good shape: 84.5 percent would be unimaginable in a country like Romania. Here it's unclear whether more than 50 percent of those entitled to vote will do so in the referendum about the dismissal of the president... The first round of the French elections has sent a clear message to Romania in its current situation: without the support of the people neither constitutional nor institutional reform count. The best thing for a democracy is to let the people make their choice." (25/04/2007)

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"If Angela Merkel wanted the first round of the French elections to produce a clear result in view of her hopes for the EU constitution, she must be disappointed," writes Radek Honzak. "The two successful candidates have more or less equal chances of winning; however their views on the EU constitution couldn't be more different... Berlin and Brussels are crossing their fingers for Sarkozy. His stance on the constitution comes closer to Merkel's - he wants most of the text to be retained and put into effect without a referendum. A victory for Royal would hinder an agreement. On Sunday she once again stressed that the constitution would have to contain a social charter, that a new convention would be necessary and that the resulting text would have to be put to referendum in France. This would be a setback for the German EU Council presidency, which hopes to save the constitution." (25/04/2007)

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All available articles from » Radek Honzak

"Blairism does not exist and never has", claims the journalist Simon Jenkins. "It is all froth and miasma. It consists of throwing a packet of words such as change, community, renewal, partnership, social and reform into the air and watching them twinkle to the ground like blossom until the body politic is carpeted with sweet-smelling bloom. An -ism implies a coherent set of ideas, an ideology capable of driving a programme in a particular direction. ... That is not to say that Britain under Blair and Gordon Brown has lacked a guiding light, but that light has been Thatcherism. This reality has been obscured by the congenital bipolarity of British politics and the bifocalism of the Westminster media, in which protocol requires that everything is expressed in terms of government and opposition. Hence Blairism cannot be Thatcherism because Blair is Labour and Margaret Thatcher Tory. For a decade British politics has, quite simply, been wrongly described." (25/04/2007)

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Russia and Poland have been caught up in a dispute about the assessment of the history of Auschwitz since the directorate of the museum on the site of the concentration camp refused to accept a set of statistics about victims put forward by Russia. According to those statistics, half of the murdered Jews were Soviet citizens. The museum points out that many of the Jews came from areas in Poland, Romania and the Baltic states that only became part of the Soviet Union in 1939, with the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Erkki Bahovski explains: "It's not the first time Poland and Russia have argued over historical issues. To this date Russia has still not recognised the massacre of Katyn, during which around 20,000 Polish officers were murdered. It prefers to regard it as a crime of the past. Another contentious issue is the history of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, when the Red Army waited on the other side of the Vistula River and simply watched while the Germans slaughtered thousands. The current dispute about the texts at Auschwitz is relatively peaceful in comparison." (24/04/2007)

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All available articles from » Erkki Bahovski

London's Tricycle theatre specialises in documentary theatre. A play which explores British Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to support the war in Iraq recently made its debut there. Patricia Benecke reviews the play titled "Called to Account": "Although this production works with minimal theatrical means, the pointed dialogues exert a strong dramatic pull which is difficult to escape. Director Nicolas Kent manages to revive memories of facts that only attentive readers of long reports would be aware of, and of information that was briefly in the media but was soon superseded by new developments. However, in its concluding speech the defence proves itself right in that no laws were demonstrably broken... Once the evidence has been presented Kent releases his audience without pronouncing judgement - he leaves it to each individual to reach his or her decision." (25/04/2007)

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All available articles from » Patricia Benecke

The documentary 'We Feed the World' by the Austrian Erwin Wagenhofer, which denounces the practices of multinational food manufacturers, will be released on French screens on Wednesday April 25th. Mathilde Blottière wonders "what impact a documentary film can have on how things evolve and what the point is in disturbing the more or less sleepy consciences of western consumers. They, that is we, are indeed the ones being addressed by the director of 'We feed the world'. Without being able to say whether he has been listened to we can say that he has been heard. His film has broken records in Austria where more than 200,000 people have been to see it. In Germany, 380,000 people have seen it. .. Behind this growing buzz there still lies a misunderstanding: viewers seem to be more outraged by what the documentary says about their own bad food than about other people's famines." (25/04/2007)

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All available articles from » Mathilde Blottière

On April 23rd, the English magazine 'Restaurant' published its annual list of the top 50 best restaurants on the planet and the Catalan establishment El Bulli run by the chef Ferran Adrià remains number one. "This is neither an Oscar nor a Nobel prize, but the result of a vote uniting a world-wide network of the most sophisticated gourmets [651 European, Asian and American experts], renowned people who decide according to their personal tastes in the same way that art critics have been imposing their criteria for centuries. ... These great geniuses of techno-emotional cuisine [2 Catalan restaurants are among the top 11] also provide proof of the excellent quality of products cultivated or fished in Catalonia, for the general benefit of Mediterranean cuisine." (25/04/2007)

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More from the press review on the subject » Public Culture, » Trade, » Spain

Is Prague or Budapest Central Europe's tourist capital? The question has long been decided in favour of Prague, writes the newspaper. But Budapest plans to spend 800 million euros by 2013 on the renovation of its inner city in order to catch up with its rival. "Prague is way ahead of Budapest, and we're still wondering how things will develop. Outside Budapest's major shopping malls commerce is stagnating, the traffic situation is becoming increasingly unbearable and the deficiencies in city's cleaning services are embarrassing. Our capital looks neglected, sad and dirty." The newspaper points out that the plans for modernising the inner-city and the municipal administration sound good, "but can the different plans for modernising the city be put into practise at the same time? The biggest mistake the politicians could make would be to work against instead of with each other." (25/04/2007)

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More from the press review on the subject » Architecture / Cities, » Hungary, » Czech Republic, » Central Europe