The vote that the AKP gained, 46.7 percent, is a record in Turkish political history. Only the Democratic Party of the 1950s – which can well be considered as a forerunner of the AKP – gained higher results, but there were only a few parties then. Today the AKP's votes exceed the combined votes of all other political parties. People-haters in action

Many pundits in the Turkish media – especially the ones who write in the papers whose front and back pages often give more space to ladies posing in bikinis, and their adventures, than to serious news and analyses – are appalled by this. Many of them had predicted, or at least hoped, that the election results would bring a CHP-MHP coalition to power. “The people will turn the light bulb off,” they used to say, referring to the symbol of the AKP. “The Republic will be saved on July 22.”

When Tarhan Erdem, a social scientist and a columnist for daily Radikal, announced his polling results about a week before the elections and predicted that the AKP's votes would turn out to be around 48 percent, he was severely attacked by these pundits. He was accused of propagating for the AKP, getting paid for that, and hating Deniz Baykal, the CHP's leader, for personal reasons. Nowadays Mr. Erdem is very happy, while many people congratulate him and some apologize.

Actually there are two trends among Turkey's die-hard secularist pundits nowadays. Some of them plead ignorance and accept that they have not been able to understand Turkey's realities. “We had been living in some other planet,” says Emin Çölaşan, Hürriyet's leading Kemalist and anti-AKP columnist. “On the election day, we landed on a country that we have no idea about.”

The second trend is less modest, though. Instead of accepting that they were wrong, these pundits rather think the people are wrong – and even stupid. Hasan Pulur and Cüneyt Arcayürek, columnists for, respectively, Milliyet and Cumhuriyet, wrote that AKP was smart enough to deceive the Turkish voters. Some politicians are making similar comments. Deniz Baykal's right-hand man, top CHP politician Onur Öymen, argued on the election night that the results were “impossible to reconcile with reason,” which was an indirect way of saying that the people are irrational. Özgür Çamak, who ran for Parliament from the MHP list but lost, was more blunt. "This people deserves everything," he said. "They have opted for treason. They sold themselves out for a little bit of money."

Of course if someone argues that a whole nation is stupid, then he better has a terribly strong argument, or otherwise people will think that there is really some stupidity around, but not in the nation. Will Gül be the president?

Anyway, enough of people-haters. Let me move on to the question of what comes next in the political scene. The new Parliament will convene, elect a head for itself, which might well be Bülent Arnç, the current speaker, and the AKP will form a government. Yet the million dollar question is, to be sure, the presidency. These early elections were held simply because the election of the AKP's candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, as president was blocked by the secularist nomenklatura via legal tricks and a harsh "secularism memorandum" given by the military. Many commentators think that this attempted deus ex machina of the oligarchy is one of the factors that contributed the AKP's victory. The majority of the Turkish people love their army when it protects them from external threats, but severely react to it when the generals try to interfere with politics by dictating to the people's representatives.

This means that if the AKP again shows Abdullah Gül as its candidate for president, he will be much stronger. The two new groups in the Parliament, the MHP and the Kurdish independents, might help the AKP pass the 367 quorum threshold, and we can have Mr. Gül as the new president. The CHP will again yell and cry about the "end of the secular Republic," and start a headscarvo-phobic campaign about Mrs. Gül – this sort of fear mongering has become the raison d'être of Mr. Baykal's party – but that won't hurt too much.

Yesterday Mr. Gül gave a press conference at which he implied that his candidacy is likely. So, yes, he can be the next president. (And, in my view, he is the most worthy person for that post in this country right now.)

But if the AKP leadership calculates that Gül's candidacy might once again spark an oligarchic reaction, and if the MHP doesn't promise support in the Parliament (by simply sitting there and helping achieve the quorum), things might be different. Then the AKP would show some other candidate, which can tame the CHP and everything it represents.

Hence the issue of the presidency might be still uncertain for sometime. What is certain is that the Turkish people, including the Kurdish citizens, opted for democracy and freedom in these elections. No mortal will be able to dismiss their will.