ANKARA (AFP) – Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan held a strategy meeting with his party leadership yesterday to discuss whether he should run for president in the face of mass secularist protests.

His purported ambition for the top job has struck at the heart of the Muslim country’s secular identity, with 500,000 people rallying in Ankara over the weekend to urge the former Islamist to back off.

Erdogan has refused to say whether he will run for the post, or when his Justice and Development Party (AKP) will announce its candidate.

The AKP’s candidate is virtually certain to win the race thanks to the party’s comfortable majority in parliament, which elects the president.

The meeting of the AKP executive board, which was expected to last until late yesterday, is seen as a milestone in shaping the party’s decision but no formal announcement of a candidate is expected, party officials said.

“The prime minister will make an evaluation of opinion polls, different views and his meetings” with civic groups and opposition parties, AKP Deputy Chairman Hayati Yazici said ahead of the meeting.

“Whatever decision he makes, our party will stand behind him.” Erdogan has hinted that the party may even wait for the last day of the registration period, April 25, to announce a candidate. No one has so far registered.

An opposition leader who discussed the presidential elections with Erdogan Tuesday said he believed Erdogan would not run. “I got the impression that he would not be a candidate,” Mehmet Agar, head of the small center-right True Path Party, told the Sabah newspaper.