A national appeals prosecutor wants Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, which emerged from a banned Islamist party, banned itself on similar grounds. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the push by Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, chief prosecutor of the court of appeals, was not aimed at his party (known by the acronym AKP from its Turkish name), but at “the will of the nation.” The request called for the party as a whole, and Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, to be banned from politics. Hasim Kilic, the president of the Constitutional Court, said it would consider whether or not to accept the complaint Monday.
The AKP, long viewed with wary eyes by bastions of secularism in Turkey, above all by the army, pushed through an initiative last month to allow women to wear Islamic headscarves in universities. That is the proximate cause of the issue.
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