Until Monday morning, most of the world believed that Turkey was following a predictable script: Citizens of this country were drifting away from Europe and the West and into Islamic authoritarianism and strongman rule, enthusiastically following the path of their increasingly autocratic but popular President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
That script proved to be profoundly wrong – something that should have been obvious to observers of Turkey's fast-changing polity, but wasn't until Turks went to the ballot in Sunday's parliamentary election.
It turns out that Turks are not enthusiastically following Mr. Erdogan's path, or sharing his beliefs. For the first time in a decade and a half, a strong majority of Turks (six out of 10) chose to vote for anyone but Mr. Erdogan's party – and what they chose to vote for instead shows just how dramatically Turks and their leader have diverged.
The Kurdish HDP party will now sit in parliament for the first time, with an impressive 80 seats, or 13 per cent of the vote – a number that likely exceeds the size of the Kurdish minority population, suggesting that large numbers of non-Kurdish Turks voted for the party's secular and liberal policies. (Mr. Erdogan legalized the Kurdish language and politics, but his relations with Kurds have soured in recent years). Armenians are also represented for the first time. And a record 96 women were voted into parliament.
Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has had powerful majorities since 2003, attracted less than 40 per cent of the vote and far less than a majority of parliamentary seats and will have to govern as a coalition – thus disabling Mr. Erdogan's plan to change the constitution to create an executive, American-style presidency with far more powers.
This direction – along with Mr. Erdogan's efforts to restrict press freedom and bring religion closer to public life – contradicts the views increasingly held by Turks, a decade of surveys show.
In 2013, a large-scale survey of Muslims around the world found a Turkish population dramatically at odds with Mr. Erdogan's direction. More than two-thirds of Turks – 67 per cent – said they preferred "democracy" over a "strong leader" (which 27 per cent supported) – a strong hint that Mr. Erdogan's efforts to become a powerful, Vladimir Putin-style president were not going well.
Likewise, polls have repeatedly shown that an overwhelming majority of Turks – typically around two-thirds – want their country to join the European Union. This was Mr. Erdogan's major ambition in his first two terms (when the secular opposition was largely anti-European), but in recent years he has abandoned it and pushed for closer ties to the Mideast and Russia.
And Mr. Erdogan's increasingly religious direction seems to contradict the interests of most Turks. The same survey found that only 12 per cent of Turks would favour making Islamic sharia law "the law of their country," one of the lowest levels of support in the Islamic world (and only 43 per cent of that 12 per cent minority felt that sharia should "also apply to non-Muslims") – compared to, for example, 42 per cent support for sharia among Russian Muslims or 86 per cent for Malaysians.
While Mr. Erdogan's party does not consider itself "Islamist" (Turkey's overtly Islamist party, Felicity, attracted less than 2 per cent of the vote and won no seats in parliament), he is a religious man who came to power by representing a minority of generally working-class religious believers who had felt marginalized in staunchly secular Turkey and who rose to become the country's dominant class. Mr. Erdogan appealed to their religiosity by pushing for the legalization of Islamic headcoverings and praising Islamist parties in neighbouring Arab countries.
But by liberating Turkey's religious believers, Mr. Erdogan may have made them less interested in his brand of politics – and, possibly, even in religious symbolism. While a slight majority of Turkish women say they favour some form of headcovering, it is not a strongly held belief: About 90 per cent of hijab-wearing Turks say they do not care if their male family members marry spouses with uncovered heads. Among those who do believe in headscarves, 90 per cent of Turkish Muslims say the matter should strictly be a woman's choice – compared to, say, 45 per cent in neighbouring Iraq.
If Mr. Erdogan is out of tune with Turks' social and religious beliefs, he is striking even greater discord with their ideas about political power.
With Mr. Erdogan's rise to power came a great collapse in Turks' respect for that power. In 2007, 63 per cent of Turks felt Mr. Erdogan was "having a good influence" on the country; 85 per cent felt the military was, and 51 per cent felt the country's religious leaders were. By 2014, those numbers had fallen to 48 per cent, 55 per cent and 37 per cent. Only the media, which had been repressed and persecuted under Mr. Erdogan, rose in popularity.
That also might have been evident in 2013, when half the Turkish public (49 per cent) said they supported Istanbul's Gezi Park protests, in which crowds clashed with police for months in favour of secularism and against Mr. Erdogan's reforms. Only 40 per cent – exactly the proportion who voted for Mr. Erdogan's party Sunday night – said they opposed the protests.
What the result shows is that the secular-minded, ethnically plural, educated crowds who took over Istanbul's Taksim Square were not an elite minority (as Mr. Erdogan and his colleagues characterized them), but a group who represent the views of a significant plurality who now command enough votes to prevent Mr. Erdogan from achieving his goals. As Mr. Erdogan has moved toward strongman rule and religious authority, his subjects have become more European, tolerant and progressive – something that began to register after Sunday's vote.
Doug Saunders