He's hardly an unknown. The man with the broad smile and warm eyes is already the face of Turkey abroad: Abdullah Gül, 56, has served his country for years as foreign minister. Yet despite spending so much time in the international spotlight, flashiness and ostentation are not his style. He prefers instead to base his reputation on discretion, balance, and reliability -- which is precisely why Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), chose him as their candidate for the Turkish presidency.

For months, Turkey had been gripped by the fear that Erdogan would opt to move into the presidency himself. His background with political Islam had made him unpalatable to the Turkish army and to all those who see Erdogan as a danger to the country's Kemalist secularism. Gül has a similar background, but contrary to Erdogan, he has never been a controversial figure. He doesn't incite others and doesn't allow himself to be provoked either. "Gül smiles even when he is furious," a Turkish paper recently wrote about the candidate. But one shouldn't be misled by his docile manner, the daily continued: "Inside, he is very tough."

Erdogan kept the trump card up his sleeve until the very last moment. The deadline to register candidates expires on Wednesday, and because the AKP hesitated in naming its candidate for so long, the presidential election was transformed into a great political riddle that the entire Turkish Republic tried to solve. And Erdogan's party did its part to ensure that the solution wasn't simple -- maybe the candidate would be a woman, the party hinted, or maybe it would be Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül, who at least has decent relations with the army.

Erdogan's alter ego

Until the very end, the media continued to believe in the possibility that Erdogan himself would lay claim to becoming Turkey's next head of state, replacing the outgoing President Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Turkish journalists, who recently accompanied Erdogan on a trip to Germany, even thought they could read Erdogan's desire for the presidency in his body language. But he managed to fool them all.

Sort of. Gül, after all, is Erdogan's closest political ally and the one he trusts more than any other. The foreign minister is Erdogan's alter ego -- guaranteeing a frictionless future cooperation between the prime minister and the president. Because the Turkish parliament is responsible for choosing the president, the AKP's majority makes Gül eventual election a mere formality.

Gül and Erdogan founded the conservative AKP together in 2001 as a more secular alternative to the Islamic parties the two had belonged to up until that point. Just one year later, the party won the 2002 general elections, and Gül jumped in as prime minister to replace an Erdogan who was briefly banned from national politics -- he had been convicted of inciting religious hatred for reciting an Islamist poem in public. After Erdogan was rehabilitated, Gül stepped aside to allow his mentor to become prime minister.

The move of nominating Gül as the party's presidential candidate is a clever one. By abandoning his presidential ambitions, Erdogan gives his political foes the impression that he has made a concession -- and he can sell the Gül candidacy as a compromise. But it's an easy concession for Erdogan to make -- Gül's political philosophy differs very little from that of the prime minister. Both want to guide Turkey to European Union membership and have introduced major reforms both in the Turkish parliament and in their own party to make that possible.

'Sensible and Intelligent'

And Gül enjoys great respect on the diplomatic stage. Even left-leaning European politicians like the Green European parliamentarian and Turkey expert Joost Lagendijk praise the conservative foreign minister as a "great reformer." The choice of Gül is "sensible and intelligent," says Lagendijk.

Gül may not be as short-tempered and irascible as his friend Erdogan. But he can be prickly when it comes to national pride and when he feels rebuffed by the European Union. Recently, for example, he skipped the EU foreign ministers' summit in Bremen to demonstrate his displeasure with the fact that Turkey had not been invited to the EU's 50th birthday party in Berlin in late March. "We will show the skeptical West that a Muslim country can be governed democratically and transparently," he once said proudly during the acrimonious beginnings of Turkey's EU accession negotiations.

Gül, who has a PhD in economics and who speaks both English and Arabic, is a religious man. He belongs to the liberal wing of the AKP and comes across as more open and more modern than Erdogan. Still, when it comes to fundamentals, the two are very similar. Both began their political careers in the Islamic Welfare Party led by Necmettin Erbakan, who was forced to step down as prime minister by the military in 1997 in the so-called "post-modern coup d'etat." Gül served that government -- the only Islamic government Turkey has had to date -- in the cabinet and as government spokesman.

Gül's wife Hayrünisa is likewise religious and wears a headscarf, as does Erdogan's wife Emine. It is for this reason that she is rarely invited along for meetings with the strictly secular outgoing President Sezer. "My wife is welcomed abroad just the way she is," Gül has complained before. But in Turkey, the headscarf is banned in schools, universities and in government offices.

Hayrünisa even went so far as to take legal action against Turkey at the European Court of Human Rights so that she could attend university despite wearing a headscarf. She only withdrew her complaint after her husband entered government so as not to cause problems for him. "We have a clear division of roles," Gül once told journalists. "I devote myself to politics and my wife raises our children."

A headscarf in the presidential mansion

There are only three days until the first in a series of parliamentary votes which will ultimately determine the presidency -- not much time to see just how the covered hair of Gül's wife might divide Turkey. The headscarf in Turkey is a powerful symbol and one that embodies the intense tug-of-war between religion and secularism. One of the main arguments against an Erdogan candidacy, in fact, was that his wife wears a headscarf. Secularists couldn't imagine a woman in a headscarf living in the president's mansion. Only 11 days ago, hundreds of thousands of convinced secularists and Kemalists -- named after the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk -- took to the streets to protest against an Erdogan candidacy.

It could be that Gül, because of his engaging manner, will attract less hostility, despite the fact that his wife wears a headscarf. Erdogan, one of the most popular Turkish prime ministers in a long time, is certainly hoping so. A President Gül would put all the political reins in his hands and allow him to concentrate fully on leading his party to another success in the general elections scheduled for this fall.

In parliament, the AKP will have the necessary majority to elect Gül by the third ballot at the latest. And then, Erdogan's party will have been successful in bringing about a mini revolution in Turkish politics. For the first time ever, a religiously-based party would have all of the country's political power in its hands and Turkey would, for the first time in its history, be represented by a president whose wife wears a headscarf.