Turkey's staunch secularists have been uneasy ever since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept to j power in 2002. The akp has its ' roots in two overtly Islamist parties that were previously banned for anti-secularism. So it is not, at first sight, surprising that the constitutional court should be considering a similar ban on the akp, and on 71 named individuals, including the president, Abdullah Gul, and the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.rnYet to ban the party, and to bar its leaders from politics for five years, less than 12 months after the akp won re-election with 47% of the vote, would be to drop a bomb on Turkey's fragile democracy.
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