No Hats in the Ring

After the abortive session, which was boycotted by the opposition, Gul said he would withdraw his candidacy, clearing the way for early general elections which have been brought forward from November to July 22.

After two roll calls 10 minutes apart, parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc closed the session, saying only 356 members were present in the first count and 358 in the second. Many opposition legislators did not attend Sunday's vote in protest of Gul's candidacy.

"After this ... my candidacy is out of the question," Gul told reporters after the roll call in parliament. "I don't feel resentment."

Setback for ruling party

Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled last Tuesday that two-thirds of the parliament, or 367 legislators, must be present for a presidential vote to be valid. In the first-round of voting, any candidate requires a two-thirds majority.

Gul, who was only 10 votes short in the initial first-round vote on April 27, was meeting with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after Sunday's second failure.

After the Constitutional Court annulled last month's ballot for quorum reasons, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) called for the early elections to end a crisis between the Islamist-rooted government and secularist opponents.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana expressed his support for Gul's presidential ambitions in an interview with Germany's mass-market Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

"I am convinced that Foreign Minister Gul would continue his successful work as president," Solana told the paper before Sunday's vote. "Turkey plays a strategic role in the region. We need a stable Turkey, a Turkey that cooperates with neighboring states Iraq and Iran, or in the conflict in the Middle East."

Gul's withdrawal, however, marks the first major setback experienced by the AKP, which has a majority in parliament, since taking over power in 2002.

Massive protests before vote

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protestors turned out across Turkey to call on Gul to withdraw his candidacy, amid concerns that his Islamist roots, and those of the AKP, pose a threat to the traditional separation of religion and state.

"Turkey is secular and will remain so," was the most popular chant at the demonstrations.

Two protests gathering more than a million people demonstrating in favor of secularism were held in April in Istanbul and Ankara. More demonstrations are planned, organizers said, in Izmir, Turkey's third largest city, on May 13 and, on May 19, in the Black Sea port of Samsun.

The prospect of a former-Islamist president with a wife who wears the Muslim headscarf also triggered a tense standoff between the army, which issued a stern warning that it would act to defend secularism, and the government, which sharply called the military to order.

Along with early elections, the AKP is seeking to push a wide-ranging package of constitutional amendments through parliament.

Chief among them is a reform that would see the head of state elected by popular suffrage instead of parliamentary vote. The president would also serve a once-renewable five year-term, instead of the current single, seven-year mandate.

The office of the president is largely ceremonial, but highly symbolic and carries the legacy Turkey's first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the secular republic in 1923.