LONDON — The best thing about the outcome of the Turkish election on Sunday is that now the army can't stage a coup. It may still want to: It was certainly making menacing noises about it recently. But after almost half the voters (47 percent) backed the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Sunday's election, the army simply cannot move against it.
A great many officers would just refuse to act against the popular will in such a blatant way, and the army would never risk a split in the officer corps.
The even better thing about this election is that Turks have decisively rejected the false dichotomy between "political Islam" and "democracy" that paralyzes politics in so many Muslim countries. That matters, because Turkey is a rapidly developing middle-income country of 75 million people that still has hopes of joining the European Union. (The current obstructionism of leaders in France, Germany, Austria and a few others countries is irrelevant, since they will probably all be gone by the time a decision is taken in 10 or 12 years' time.) But the election outcome is also important for other Muslim-majority countries.