BRUSSELS—The European Union warned Turkey's military on Saturday to stay out of politics after the General Staff said it was watching the parliamentary election of a new president with concern.
"It is important that the military leaves the remit of democracy to the democratically elected government and this is a test case if the Turkish armed forces respect democratic secularism and the democratic arrangement of civil-military relations," EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn told reporters.
Rehn said he was studying the statement by military commanders carefully and underlined that respect for democracy was a key condition of Turkey's EU candidacy.
"The timing is rather surprising and strange," he said. "It's important that the military respects also the rules of the democratic game and its own role in that democratic game."
The powerful General Staff, which has intervened five times in the last 50 years to topple governments, issued its statement hours after an inconclusive first round of voting split Turkish secularists and the Islamist-rooted government.
"The Turkish armed forces are watching this (election) situation with concern," the General Staff said, reminding politicians that the military was the ultimate defender of secularism.
Rehn said secular democracy held a very high value for the European Union and was the core of Turkey's "Europeanisation project", dear also to the military and to followers of the founder of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Turkey, a secular state with an overwhelmingly Muslim population, began negotiations to join the 27-nation EU in 2005 but has made only slow progress, partly due to an unresolved dispute over the divided island of Cyprus.
One of the key criteria for EU membership is civilian control over the armed forces.
