By one vote and one vote alone, the ruling government party in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP, has avoided a judicial ban. Although the Constitutional Court judges agreed not to outlaw this party in order to avoid a major political crisis, they did, on the other hand, deem the accusations leveled against the party to be well-founded. Thus is it written that the fierce struggle between Islamists and secularists will continue with renewed vigor.

    Before anything else, it is necessary to note that the country's high court is composed of 11 magistrates and that six of them - or a simple majority - voted for the dissolution of the AKP. But here's the thing, with the qualified majority set at seven votes, the AKP emerged unscathed (but rattled all the same) from the legalist fight into which it was plunged by those who hold to the secular - SECULAR - character of the country's basic law.

    And now I must note another fundamental fact. When Kemal Ataturk got down to modernizing Turkey, he proved more Jacobin than the Jacobins. More Robespierre than Robespierre. Unlike France, where, as everyone knows, separation between church and state was decreed; Ataturk decided that religion had to be subordinated to the state. Thus, today still, it's the government that names the imams for the country's 77,000 mosques. The government which suggests - one could say imposes - the themes of their sermons - when it doesn't actually write them.

    When the military and secularists held the reins of power, religious proselytism was reduced to the bare bones for decades. But when, during the 1980s, Kurdish Communists came forward more vigorously than they had in the past, the authorities favored the emergence of a certain Islamism to counter those people who considered religion the opium of the people. The net result of these passages is that when the AKP came to power in 2002, it found itself de facto master of a network of mosques and other pressure points that it hastened to use as a sounding board for its political agenda, obviously crossbred with religious ambition.

    To return to the subject of the day - the court's decision - one must understand that the event that instigated it was not an isolated event. It was also not a primary event that previewed a chain of events, but an event that shines a light on the AKP's desire to broaden religious presence in spheres of activity it had not yet been involved in. One thinks, of course, about the wearing of headscarves in universities - which the AKP proposed and this same court moreover prohibited several months ago.

    Before, well before, Erdogan attacked the university world through the interposition of the headscarf, he had applied himself meticulously to handing Turkey's crown jewels over to businessmen sharing his religious views. His first target? The media. He exploited all the holes observed in television legislation to "pass along" the Sabah-ATV conglomerate - the second-most-important in the country - to a pro-AKP financier. You won't be surprised to learn that the latter appointed Erdogan's son-in-law president of that company.

    After the media, it was the banks' and big companies' turn. Every time Erdogan and the current president, Abdullah Gul, had the opportunity to place AKP intimates at the head of influential entities, they hastened to seize it. The same rule held true for the apparatus of the state as for the private sector: AKP militants were given preferential treatment. That program's distinguishing feature? The number of women occupying important positions has melted like snow in the sun. In passing, let it be said that among the ministers, assistant ministers, secretaries of state and undersecretaries of state, one finds one woman and one woman only. Of course, she is responsible for Women's Issues.

    Strong from the hold they have over the country, Erdogan and his intimates have found nothing better than to brutally strike out at those who criticize them. Notably journalists, some of whom are today in prison. The victory, however narrow it may be, that the prime minister has just won on the legal front will certainly encourage him to continue down the road of Turkey's Islamicization, unless he should renounce the ideas that are at the heart of the AKP. Eventually, it's likely that Turkey will be more like Jordan - half-secular, half-religious - than like any democracy of the European Union that Turkey nonetheless still wants to join.

    Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.