After the earthquake

摘要

Alandslide? It was more like an earthquake. Turkey's voters this week dumped most of their political parties, nearly all of their political heavyweights and nine out of ten members of their previous parliament. In place of eight parties, the new legislature includes just two, of which one has a huge overall majority, a rare thing in Turkey. Still rarer, this party, though not Islamist, has a clearly Muslim background-the sort of thing that the secularist armed forces would not normally tolerate, indeed did not the last time (briefly, up to 1997) Turkey had an Islamic-led government.