TURKEY:Streetwise and economically capable, the AKP looks likely to emerge as the winner after next Sunday's Turkish elections, writes Nicholas Birchin Istanbul
Choosing who to vote for in the Turkish elections this weekend was never going to be difficult for Emin Turan.
A grocer in the working-class Istanbul neighbourhood of Kasimpasa, his shop is next door to the wooden house prime minister Tayyip Erdogan was born in in 1954.
"He's a humble man from a humble family," Turan (64) says. "Even today, his house is always open to people like me." Erdogan was witness at the wedding of Turan's son. Just six weeks ago, he dropped by to offer his condolences for a death in the family.
If Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) looks set to pick up its second parliamentary majority in five years, it is largely because it shares its leader's personal touch. Like the Islamist parties it broke away from, the AKP has a formidable local network of volunteers, and an energy that leaves its chief competitors far in its wake.
"Have you ever heard of an election where the government holds twice as many rallies as the chief opposition?" asks Cuneyt Ulsever, a political analyst critical of the AKP. "Erdogan talks to people. The secularist leaders only talk to journalists."
He's referring to the Republican People's Party, whose senior cadre of ageing diplomats looks increasingly cut off from the realities of modern Turkey.
But the AKP has another major advantage over its competitors. Coming to power after the worst economic crisis in Turkey's 84-year history, it has presided over five years of continuous, rapid growth.
National income has more than doubled in four years. Inflation is down from 70 per cent to single figures. Even unemployment, high at 10 per cent, is creeping down.
"Our attraction? We're a centrist, pragmatic party bringing a modern way of life to Turkish people, which is their aspiration," says AKP deputy Egemen Bagis, twisting silver worry beads through his fingers.
Like Erdogan, Bagis denies his party has any links to Islam, brushing off the label "Muslim democrat" in favour of "conservative democrat". But you only have to look at the photos and newspaper cuttings stuck on the wall behind Emin Turan's till to see evidence of the divisions in Turkish society.
Instead of the Republic's founder, Ataturk, whose bust is omnipresent in public buildings and squares throughout the country, pride of place is given to Adnan Menderes, a right-wing prime minister executed by the military in 1960.
A text by the Islamic-leaning poet Necip Fazil Kisakurek jostles for space with a picture of the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, a man Turkish school children are taught was a traitor.
"These were patriotic men, all of them," says Turan, "but their names have been excised from our history." For some secularists, Turan's affection for the Ottoman past and scepticism about the harshly secular Republican legacy - common on the political right - constitutes a threat to the regime.
That seems unlikely. Asked why he isn't voting for Turkey's small Islamist party, Turan laughingly dismisses them as "men whose noses are buried in religion". It was a sentiment widely shared at a 400,000-strong AKP rally outside Istanbul's great Byzantine wall this Sunday afternoon. "Why AKP?" asks Emine Yurdakul, one of a sizeable minority of women not wearing headscarves. "Because life has got easier under them." Meeting a few miles down the road on the same day, meanwhile, the Islamists Turan mocks could only field 15,000.
The organiser of two major recent studies of Turkish public opinion, Binnaz Toprak, is not surprised by the vastly different success of the two rallies. Her work has shown support for Islamic law falling from 21 per cent to 9 per cent since 1999, as well as a drop in the number of women wearing headscarves.
Yet, while she is willing to buy AKP's claims to represent the political centre, that doesn't stop her worrying that the tensions that boiled over in massive secularist marches this April could rise again.
"Particularly in a country like Turkey, where two societies live side by side, politics is about perceptions, not reality," she says. "If Turkey is to move forward, politicians have to start looking for consensus."
Many question the AKP's - and particularly Erdogan's - capacity to do that.
Increasingly irascible, the prime minister has a tendency to accuse people who disagree with him of treason.
In the run-up to elections, he decided to sack a third of his party's MPs without consulting even his right-hand man, foreign minister Abdullah Gul.
"Erdogan runs his party in the same way [ chief of staff Yasar] Buyukanit runs the army," says Hakan Yavuz, a political scientist who has just edited a book about the AKP. "Authoritarianism is the political culture. These people breathe the same air."
Tomorrow: the opposition, the issues