I had written in an earlier Al-Monitor article that the Erdogan government would be successful in the elections and the Gulenists would be the losers. Some analysts did not want to see this reality and failed miserably. But for analysts who understand Turkish society, the results are not surprising.

According to Gulenists and some other analysts who also write in these columns, the Dec. 17 graft probe and the tape-recording leaks that followed were enough to topple any political authority. The opposition really believed that it was going to be easy, because according to them the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had committed illegitimate actions that disregarded the law. They were further emboldened by believing that Gulenists had more ammunition in reserve against the AKP and, anyway, AKP’s prestige in the Western world was rapidly eroding. Many writers were confident that the United States was unhappy with the AKP government, therefore a redesign of Turkish politics was inevitable and that meant a Turkey without Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan confronted these challenges with a war strategy and won. In that process, the difference between the judiciary and the law emerged. The judiciary was questioned how effectively it represented legality and whether the investigations they began were truly in the name of legality. The attitudes of prosecutors, statements by senior judiciary officials that carried political connotations, the way investigation files were merged and opinions formed on that basis were all traced to Fethullah Gulen. No wonder many of us think that this judiciary was guided more by politics and not legality.

Second, there was a void between legality and democracy. Indeed, in the history of Turkish democracy there was a weakness, because we were living with a legal system and structure that almost never emphasized democracy. But the situation that developed actually benefited the AKP. The debate was the comparison between the judiciary and democracy. Legality was omitted from this debate. By pointing to the judiciary as serving a certain political wing, the AKP ended up with the opportunity of portraying itself as the defender of democracy.