Over the weekend, Turkey experienced something resembling an electoral earthquake, with Sunday's general election yielding an array of unexpected outcomes that suggest a major political reconfiguration lies ahead for the Republic.
That has come as something of a surprise. After all, over the past several years, Turkish politics have been nothing if not predictable. Since coming to power in 2002, the country's ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP, has systematically consolidated its political control, in the process moving Turkey ever closer to becoming an authoritarian one-party state. As a result, more than a few seasoned observers concluded that this election, like past ones in 2007 and 2011, was destined to be much ado about nothing.