"Turkey Showdown Averted, For Now
Wednesday, Jul. 30, 2008 By PELIN TURGUT / ISTANBUL
Turkey's popularly elected, Islamist-rooted government survived to rule another day, after the country's top court narrowly ruled today against banning the ruling party. In a narrow 6-5 opinion, Constitutional Court judges held that there was insufficient evidence backing the charge that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was undermining Turkey's secular democracy and seeking to turn the country into an Islamic state. The court did, however, issue a warning on the issue, and it cut public funding for the party by half, leaving Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan facing a monumental challenge to restore political stability in a nation riven by increasingly bitter divisions between secularists and government supporters. "
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