Erdogan’s Comeuppance

The surprise results in Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Turkey were a breath of fresh air. It appears that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s dream of substantially increasing his power through a parliamentary rewriting of the Turkish constitution were dashed when his party lost its parliamentary majority.

It wasn’t too long ago that Mr. Erdogan, in his determination to burnish Turkey’s credentials as an Islamist state at the cost of the secularism that had brought much economic and political success to Turkey, upended his country’s decades-long cooperative relationship with Israel.

And while he remains a powerful figure, with supporters embedded throughout the Turkish bureaucracy, one hopes the prospect of a prime minister from a party other than his own will at least serve as a restraint on his anti-Israel animus. Perhaps Turkey’s increasingly negative relations with the United States, threatening the efficacy of the NATO alliance, will be reversed as well.