Prime Minister of Turkey Tayyip Erdogan said he would address the nation amid a crisis over a presidential election that has pitted secularists including the powerful army against his Islamist-rooted government.
Financial markets in Turkey tumbled in early trade as investors took fright at instability triggered by a court challenge to the presidential election process and a mass demonstration against the ruling AK Party. The lira currency fell four percent and the Istanbul main share index plunged eight percent.
Erdogan is under heavy pressure from secularists, including the powerful army, to withdraw his AK Party's candidate for president, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist whose wife wears the Muslim headscarf.
Gul said on Sunday that he remained a candidate for the election, which is conducted in a parliament where AK holds an overwhelming majority.
Turkey's Constitutional Court began on Monday to examine an opposition request to suspend the presidential election, a move which would trigger early parliamentary elections and, in the view of many analysts, would help defuse tensions.
The court has said it will try to issue its verdict by Wednesday, when parliament is due to hold a second round of voting on Gul's candidacy. Parliament, where Erdogan's ruling AK Party now has a big majority, elects the president in Turkey.
The AK Party government, which has pressed a programme of liberal economic and social reforms designed to bring the country into the European Union, faces its biggest crisis since it was elected in 2002.
The Prime Minister's office said Erdogan would deliver his address to the nation at 2015 local time (1715 GMT). He makes regular television statements to highlight his government's successes, but is expected this time to focus on the crisis.
As many as one million people attended an anti-government rally in Istanbul, Turkey's biggest city and business hub on Sunday.
Many protesters accused the government of planning an Islamist state and criticised it for failing to consult the opposition over the choice of President, who carries great symbolic weight and has important veto and appointment powers.
The secularists fear Erdogan and Gul, both former Islamists, want to chip away at Turkey's strict separation of state and religion. Erdogan denies any secret agenda and says he just wants to ease some of Turkey's curbs on religious expression.
Turkey's business elite has welcomed AK Party policies that have slashed inflation and revived the country's economy after years of deep crisis. But it now backs opposition calls for an early general election.
Erdogan, however, will want to avoid giving any impression his government has buckled under army and opposition pressure. - DDNews India
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