LONDON, 24 July 2007 — The stunning victory of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) Party in Sunday’s snap general election evokes two loud cheers for democracy and is a slap in the face for military rule through the back door.

AK Party’s 47 percent of the vote is an electoral landslide the likes of which Turkey has not witnessed since the 1950s. Out of a total of 550 parliamentary seats, AK Party has won a staggering 341; followed by the center left Republican People’s Party (CHP), now the main opposition, with 20 percent or 112 seats; the ultra-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) with 14 percent or 70 seats; and the remaining 27 seats taken up by independents mainly Turkish Kurds but also former Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz, who was returned as member of Parliament for Rize on the Black Sea — the first time that the constituency has elected an independent to represent them in the National Assembly in Ankara.

Contrary to reports in the international media, including the BBC, this was not an election pitting so-called “Islamism” against secularism. How fickle of these media, for no sooner had Erdogan been returned with the percentage of vote which parties in the so-called industrialized democracies could only dream of, they started to change their tune and talk about the triumph of the “pro-European AK Party.”

The real battle for the soul of Turkish politics is between the democratic polity and the pervasive influence of the country’s armed forces. In the recent past it used to be the center-right and center-left parties headed by stalwarts such as Suleiman Demirel and Bulent Ecevit who used to fall foul of the powerful military. The joke was on Turkey not as ‘the Sick Man of Europe’ but about the ‘Ten Year Cycle’ of military coups.

In 1980, Gen. Kenan Evren led the last coup in the country. We all waited for 1990 and 2000 to see whether the generals were itching to get back into power or whether they were finally confined to their barracks. The era of Turgut Ozal in the 1980s gave rise to a new polity in Turkish democracy. But just as we thought that the generals were more interested in war and peace games, they reared their ugly heads a decade later in ousting the coalition government of Islamist Necmettin Erbakan and center right Tansu Ciller. This was a coup in every way except name.

The current bogey for the generals, supported by a rabidly secular media and establishment, is the so-called “Islamist threat,” whose alleged aim is to take back the country to the days of the Ottoman rule.

This view is a gross misunderstanding and oversimplification of Turkish politics. When secularists on both the left and right of the political spectrum side with the military in trying to oust a democratically elected government, albeit with moderate Islamist roots, then there is something seriously wrong with Turkish democracy, and should be of concern to all democrats the world over.

Unfortunately, the role of the military in Turkish politics is one of the pernicious legacies of Kemalism, the policies espoused by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk , the founder of the modern republic.

There is no doubt that Ataturk played a crucial role in the victorious campaigns of the Young Turks against the Greeks in the independence war in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. Millions of Turks — secular or otherwise — rightly revere him for that.

But Ataturk’s modernizing crusade should not be blurred by some of the anti-democratic legacies of his actions and policies. For instance, his hasty and arbitrary abolition of the Osmanli script left subsequent generations of Turks illiterate in researching their imperial history of almost 500 years. The Ottoman Empire left an archival legacy which is the envy of other civilizations.

Most importantly, Ataturk was a general complete with the authoritarian streak of a political patriarch. To this day, the military sees itself as the patriarch of the Turkish state. Here lie the roots, perhaps more disturbingly, of the military’s perception of Turkish democracy. They see themselves, as one general once told me, as “the guardian of the Turkish constitution and state.” For any student of democracy, this would be anathema, for the textbooks tell us that it is Parliament that is the guardian of the constitution.

This is why the ultimate power in Turkish politics is not prime minister Erdogan nor President Ahmet Necdet Sezer nor the National Assembly in Ankara, but the National Security Council, which includes the Chief of General Staff Gen. Ya-ar Büyükant.

Needless to say, the military’s views on certain no-go areas in Turkish politics remains paramount and pervasive. Any politician or party that dares challenge the military faces the threat of action or a smear campaign such as the current one of a threat to secularism.

Not surprisingly, it was the army generals who precipitated the recent political crisis regarding AK Party’s nomination of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as the next president, and the subsequent calling of a general election by Premier Erdogan.

Erdogan’s victory is a victory for democracy and for Turkey’s maturing political culture.

Despite the onslaught of a biased media, the Turkish voters have risen to the occasion and decided not to bite the hand that has fed it well over the last five years.

As one voter in Istanbul declared: “I am not worried about the so-called Islamist threat. I am sure Erdogan will not go down that route. All I know is that my business has thrived over the last five years during the time AK Party has been in power.”

Then to the generals and the secularists of the right and left, to use a celebrated Clintonspeak, “it is the economy, stupid” that has returned Erdogan, whose AK Party is more a Muslim equivalent of Germany’s Christian Democrats, than a theocratic party in the current Iranian mold.