If anyone thinks this military and Kemalism is going to change the country into the right direction they are being to optimistic. May I remind the very reason why the AKP has so much support in among the voters is the very inability of the former Kemalistic regime. Kemalism is not the solution but the very root of the evil in the Turkish society. AKP and the Kemalists don't take much from each other.
Personally, I believe that certain countries and cultures are better served by centrist values, politics and governments--and Turkey is one of them. Though Kemalism implemented many progressive, secularist, socialist policies within post WW1 Turkey, it also ironically touched on Stalinist totalitarianism veiled as "nationalism" in a few places, as far as seeking to aggressively rid Turkey of "cultural difference" and unite all underneath a narrowly defined Turkish identity and homogeneity through state sponsored violence--which is why the Kurds and Armenians were persecuted, disenfranchised and massacred. Extreme-leftists can be just as intolerant and destructive as the right-wing.
I've said this elsewhere recently--fundamentalism in the modern world is more concerned with power, identity and legitimacy than it is to religion, which is usually secondary. Muslims find themselves in a peculiar position because unlike Christians, who have become thoroughly secular throughout much of the West and have a more decentralized and individualized notion of Christianity/spirituality/belief, Islam is intimately and innately attached to their identity; it's even more important than their ethnicity and nationality in many cases. And that identity is connected to a traditional value system that finds itself at odds with science, modernity, secularism and Western cultural dominance. Therefore,
of course resistance and pushback in the form of an opposing ideology and worldview, rooted in fundamentalism, is to be expected. Historically--across all countries, peoples and belief systems, an inability to reconcile social complexity (power dynamics and hegemony/identity politics) lays at the heart of fundamentalist uprisings. Under Erdogan, the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction, which will have dire consequences for the Turkish people who are perhaps better served by a system that allows for all, both the traditional and the secular, to have equal voices.
I also think it's important to mention that Erdogan won the last election by a 52/48 margin, so it's not as if the Turkish people overwhelmingly chose an Islamist. There is a real tension between traditional Muslim values and the Western secular values. Interestingly enough, the USA finds itself in a somewhat similar situation--though a bit less volatile--as far as the tension between conservative Christian values and secular liberalism both vying for dominance.
