Petr Kučera describes Turkey's new president and outgoing Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül as a "good Islamist" and an "Islamic democrat." "He's definitely not a radical. Although he is openly committed to the religious roots of the AKP party which he co-founded, he refutes the opposition's claims that his goal is to establish an Islamic regime in Turkey. In the five years since they came to power, Gül and his colleagues have made much greater efforts towards pro-European and democratic reform than any of the secular parties did in several dozen years. The prominent Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand rightly criticised the radical secularists, who are more preoccupied with the headscarf worn by the new first lady than her husband's capabilities." (29/08/2007)

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Gyula Krajczár comments on Güls victory: "The election of the eleventh president of the modern Republic of Turkey opens a new chapter in the country's history. Previous presidents of this emphatically secular state have always been avid supporters of the Republic's founder Kemal Atatürk. Although politicians or parties with a different concept of the relationship between the state and religion have held the executive several times in the past, the army and other elitist secular organisations have always protected the secular state - through more or less subtle means and four times even by staging coups. Their opponent's conquest of the presidential office creates an entirely new situation. Because the president is elected by parliament he has only limited powers, but he can block the passage of new laws and according to the constitution he is the supreme commander of the armed forces." (29/08/2007)

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"The anomaly in Turkey is military power, not the fact that a former Islamist has been elected president. This election reflects the social reality of a country that is, according to polls, not very preoccupied by the president's wife's veil", considers the Spanish daily. "The new situation in Turkey represents a big challenge for Europe. The EU cannot slam its door in the face of Turkey's desire to join it, which is also a desire for modernisation. ... The experience of the full exercise of power by moderate Islamists, who say they accept secular constitutional rules, is not only crucial for Turkey, but also for the whole of the Muslim world and for Europe." (29/08/2007)

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Gérald Papy welcomes this election. "On Tuesday, Turkey pulled itself up and out of its existential crisis. Institutional rules were respected. The natural candidate for the presidency, who imposed himself all the more with the AKP victory in the legislative elections in July, was elected in the third round of the elections with a simple majority. He immediately promised to respect secularism. The army, in the end, after one last warning on Monday evening and ostensible grievance on Tuesday, is left to watch by the wayside. .. . It has to be said that since being in power, Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gül have favoured the economic development of Turkey and relations with the European Union, thus proving that Islam can blend into democracy. In these times of religious radicalisation, the Turkish laboratory is not only precious; it is vital." (29/08/2007)

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Frédéric Koller feels that "The AKP has won its bet. It is about to become a big centre-right party, respectful of institutions, a Muslim equivalent of Europe's Christian-democrat parties. Turkey can thus hope to become a model for the entire Muslim world. In Morocco, currently preparing for elections, a former Islamist party is already claiming the legacy of the AKP. It is the scenario -optimistic- that the West no longer dared believe in, stuck with the simplistic cultural notion that associates Islam with terror. The truth is of course more complex. And the success of Gül goes well beyond the secular/religious divide, carried as he is by an excellent economic conjuncture. It however remains to be seen whether we can brush aside the hypothesis that one day the AKP might fall back on Islamist values - as the secularists suspect- to cement its electorate in times of crisis." (29/08/2007)

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Kai Strittmatter describes how Gül's opponents eventually ran out of arguments and have been left with only one flimsy complaint: Hayrünnisa Gül's headscarf. "A bearded man with a wife who wears a headscarf - and not even loosely in accordance with long-standing Turkish tradition but tightly bound under her chin so as to completely cover her hair and neck. The army hasn't missed a single opportunity to depict this as the worst possible scenario from its point of view. But what about the rest of the country? As far as it's concerned this is a step further towards normality. In a recent poll conducted by the liberal newspaper Milliyet, 70 percent said it made no difference whether the president's wife wore a headscarf or not. Almost as many say it doesn't matter that the president is religious. They still trust Gül to protect Turkey's secular constitution. Gül's opponents will watch the couple's every move, waiting for them to make the slightest mistake. However the past few years under the AKP government have illustrated how superficial their old dress code really is. All of a sudden it was the moustachioed devout who were the more open-minded and the purported secularists in their fine suits who were the diehard conservatives." (29/08/2007)

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Georges Mink, research director at the political and social science institute, CNRS, examines the discrepancies between how History is seen in Western Europe and how it is seen in the countries from the former Eastern Block. The latter "are challenging us to face up to their national memory. ... Since 1989, countries in central Europe have built a strategy using the West's 'debt' to the East in order to increase pressure on the EU and to create demand for necessary adjustments of national memory along with compensation. ... In order to avoid dividing national memory at a delicate moment in the construction of Europe, should we not take more notice of the countries which have emerged from the collapse of Soviet rule and their will to incorporate the experience of Soviet oppression into the pedestal of legitimate European history?" (29/08/2007)

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Following the creation of a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity in France, the writer Tahar Ben Jelloun wonders "why associate immigration with national identity? ... If France is seeking to anticipate and prepare the future of its social landscape, the main preoccupation of immigrants is simply to guarantee a future and survival for their families. In this case, there is no question of identity. ... The problem of identity is not a foremost concern for immigrants, but it is for their children born on the land they immigrate to. However, we tend to forget the fact that they are French and that their identity is written on their ID cards and passports. The same can be said of other European countries where more and more children with non-European parents are being born everyday." (29/08/2007)

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The heads of government of Croatia and Slovenia have agreed to refer the border conflict smouldering between them for 16 years now to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Franco Juri comments: "Slovenian Prime Minister Janes Jasa and his Croat counterpart Ivo Sanader acted like mature and responsible politicians for the first time in Bled. They entered the limelight and performed like a good team that has finally realised what society expects of them - including the media, the general public and the somewhat impatient European Union, which will soon be under Ljubljana's presidency and plans to integrate Zagreb in the near future." (27/08/2007)

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Two years after the election defeat of the social democratic SLD government, Poland's left is making an astoundingly quick comeback, Joanna Lichocka reports. She notes that in the run-up to this autumn's early elections a new left-wing democratic alliance (LiD) formed by the SLD, SDPL, the Liberals and the Workers Union has become socially acceptable. "The LiD is still a loose alliance between four different parties and groups. They bicker continually with each other and have no clear leader... Nonetheless, it still has the wind in its sails and every chance of growing. For since the PiS government started employing totalitarian methods, violating civil rights and persecuting political opponents, can one still claim that the SLD government was just as bad? The corruption scandals under former SLD Prime Minister Leszek Miller were nothing in comparison to what the ruling PiS is getting up to, the SLD politicians argue. And they're right." (29/08/2007)

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Austria is discussing whether to maintain its current policy of neutrality following a proposal made within the conservative ÖVP party to abolish the neutrality principle. Since the discussion broke out, "all the party leaders have been busy pledging their loyalty to the corresponding paragraphs in the constitution," writes Nina Weißensteiner, adding: "What the parties are keeping quiet about is that the European Union's common security concept, to which they have all professed their commitment, naturally entails a complete break with neutrality, which was already undermined when the country joined the EU... But the electorate refuses to accept this. This is why against their better judgement both the SPÖ and the ÖVP are unwilling to go down in history as the party that abolished neutrality. And this is why the Greens, despite their absolute commitment to Europe in other areas, are casting themselves in the role of the pacifist defenders of neutrality. And this is also why even the heirs of the FPÖ, once a staunch supporter of NATO, are now professing their commitment to continued neutrality." (29/08/2007)

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The journalist Gad Lerner considers Florence's municipal decree forbidding window cleaner to work at traffic lights. Many town halls would like to follow Florence's example, but the decree is polemical. "The respect of the law is a fundamental principle which does not allow for any exemptions ... . Washing car windows at traffic lights could never be considered a job, or be disguised as a tacitly tolerated palliative for unemployment. Integration involves a different path pointed towards the restoration of human dignity and does not work by exposing poverty. Rackets that speculate on our feelings of guilt lead to the weakening of human solidarity. ... So severity is welcome, but only if part of a pact guaranteeing civil solidarity." (29/08/2007)

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Germany's train drivers, who are organised into their own trade union, are currently negotiating a considerable hike in their salaries with the leaders of Germany's railway company. Markus Sievers comments: "The doctors refuse to be satisfied with the same salary increase as the nurses, the pilots want a larger percentage than the stewardesses and the traffic controllers want more than their colleagues in administration. The powerful elites are using their exposed position to achieve their goals. They are renouncing solidarity with the majority, causing deep rifts within companies and rocking the foundations of collective agreements... The nation sympathises with the labour disputes led by doctors at hospitals and train drivers because for years their demands have received too little consideration in collective pay negotiations." (29/08/2007)

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The Veronika Prize for the best contemporary poetry is awarded Each year in Slovenia. The prize is named after Veronika Deseniska, the second wife of Count Friedrich II of Celje who was said to possess magic powers. Peter Kolsek reflects on poetry's status today. "If you look in bookstores in Paris, London or Vienna, you'll have difficulty finding a shelf dedicated to poetry. And even if there does happen to be one, it'll be very short. Here in Slovenia things are different: we have metres of shelves full of poetry in our bookstores, located just as prominently as those for other types of literature. This is in keeping with our tradition which is still heavily influenced by France Prešeren, the renowned 19th century Slovene poet." Kolsek nonetheless points out that contemporary poetry is struggling today. "Nowadays poetry is perceived as a relict of a pre-modern society, both here and all over the world. We don't see it as profitable, functional or competitive." (29/08/2007)

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In the light of a rise in violence among young Britons, fiction writer Dreda Say Mitchell analyses the influence of music on behaviour. "Rockers have had their day as a threat to the nation's young. If you're bang up to date, you're blaming rap, specifically gangsta rap, for guns and gangs. ... In fact there's very little violence or guns in mainstream rap. ... The real problem with rap is that far from undermining society's values it's reinforcing them, and the most fundamental of all our society's values at the moment is that you are what you own. Commercial rap's money and success ethic won't do any harm to middle-class youth; they have access to the professions and property where they can participate in it. For working-class youngsters, taught by our culture since the 1970s that they're losers and failures, it's part of a profoundly poisonous cocktail of attitudes. Pride and self-respect are at the heart of this debate and it's the lack of those, or the wrong sort, that's really driving the violence on our streets." (29/08/2007)

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The columnist John Waters recently attended a festival of Irish culture at the 28th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, held in Rimini, Italy. He notes a difference between Italians and the Irish. "It is a difference infused with pathos and tragedy, embracing thought, speech, hand gestures and dress sense. ... The truly tragic part was to see these people loving us more than we love ourselves, to watch 3,000 young Italians, of all ages, rush to dance at the foot of the stage ... . Onstage the dancers were from an Italian school of Irish dancing, Gens D'Is, established a few years ago by Umberto Crespi, a young Italian so bowled over by a visit to Ireland that he took a course in Irish dancing and then went home to teach as many Italians as he could." (29/08/2007)

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