Turkey's parliament on Tuesday elected Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül as the country's new president.

The politician, a member of the conservative-Islamic AKP party, will replace head of state Ahmet Necdet Sezer, despite objections from the country's powerful military. The army views itself as guardian of the country's secularist tradition and hinted earlier this year that it might stage a coup if Gül were elected.

During two earlier rounds of voting in May, Gül had failed to obtain the required two-thirds majority. But after snap elections in July, the AKP earned enough seats to lead alone. Additionally, the third round of voting required only a simple majority of 276 votes.

Gül's earlier attempts at getting elected failed because Turkey's largest opposition party, the social democratic CHP, boycotted the vote and launched a national political crisis that forced early elections.

Gül is unpopular with Turkey's secularist elite, who fear that his AKP party will seek to establish political Islam in the country. Gül's wife wears the Islamic headscarf. The secularists, backed by the powerful military, fear Gül's policies will lead to creeping Islamization in a country that has been secular since sweeping reforms made in the 1930s by the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Objections to Gül have been exacerbated by the fact that the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is also a member of the AKP party.

On Monday, the military, which has ousted four governments since 1960, issued yet another warning about Gül's election. On its Web site, military chief General Yasar Buyukanit wrote: "Our nation has been watching the behaviour of those separatists who can't embrace Turkey's unitary nature and centers of evil that systematically try to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic."

However, analysts said they didn't think the military would risk a coup this time around -- especially after an election that saw overwhelming support for the AKP, seen by many as a public backlash against the military's heavy-handed role in national politics.