'Simply a disaster': The results of Turkey's historic election were surprising - and ominous

On Sunday, Turkish President Recep Erdogan and his party regained their parliamentary majority in a landslide win that outperformed every poll and surprised even the most seasoned analysts.

The win has given Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) an indisputable mandate to govern, implicitly granting legitimacy to the authoritarian tactics undertaken by the president in the run-up to elections.

"The national will manifested itself on November 1 in favor of stability," Erdogan told reporters after praying at a mosque in Istanbul, adding that the world must respect the results of the election.

But around the world, concerns linger that the win has only served to further embolden a man with decidedly authoritarian ambitions and strain the country's traditional alliances.

"The elections results could push Turkey further into authoritarianism as the AKP continues to undermine the rule of law and undertake reprisals against the opposition," Aykan Erdemir, a nonresident fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former member of Turkish parliament, told Business Insider by email.

"Under four years of single-party rule by the AKP, Turkey could drift further from the European Union and NATO."

A senior official from the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), which had expected to enter into coalition talks with the AKP, put it more bluntly: The result is "simply a disaster."

'Our neighbors were scared'

The AKP lost its parliamentary majority in June - largely due to the success of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) passing the electoral threshold of 10% to be represented in parliament for the first time.

Since then, Erdogan has relied on increasingly hardline tactics to shore up support from Turkish nationalists and suppress dissent.

In July, Ankara began bombing the Kurdish PKK in northern Iraq, reigniting a 30-year insurgency. The war served as a huge gamble, but it appears to have paid off: The escalating violence is, some Kurds say, what led many of their friends and neighbors to vote for the AKP instead of the pro-Kurdish HDP.

"I am a Kurdish loyalist so I didn't change my vote, but I know that other people might have changed their minds," 24-year-old Ersin Polat, who works in a clothing store in the Sur district, told Reuters on Sunday.

"I know that our neighbors were scared and they were going to vote for AKP this time."

Indeed, on Monday, OSCE election observers declared that the elections were "unfair" and "overshadowed by a climate of fear," echoing claims made by the HDP that it had been unable to campaign effectively because it had been busy trying to quell violence in the predominantly Kurdish southeast.

The fears were intensified after an ISIS-linked suicide bomber killed more than 150 people in Ankara in October, just three months after his brother killed 32 activists at a pro-Kurdish rally in Suruc.

"The AKP out-performed all of its polls - most analysts, including myself, thought that the AKP would be forced to enter into negotiations with an opposition party," Aaron Stein, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Business Insider by email.

He added: "Kurdish youth aligned with the PKK could hasten their self-declared push for regional autonomy in certain cities, but there is no doubt that the AKP has a mandate to govern."

And Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, thinks this new mandate will only inflame tensions further.

"This is a deeply troubling development that will [give] Erdogan more of a free hand to pursue many dangerous foreign policies, including Turkish support for jihadi groups in Syria and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas," Schanzer told Business Insider by email.

He added: "It will also give Erdogan a free hand to intensity his campaign against the Kurds."

Metin Gurcan, a former Turkish military adviser in Afghanistan and Iraq, echoed this sentiment - with a warning.

"If the AKP does not move forward with a novel reformist spirit - and decides instead to push the limits of the presidency and go hard against the Kurdish issue - then the AKP will not be able to govern Turkey peacefully," Gurcan said.

'A Putin-style presidency'

A particularly brutal crackdown on the media in the days leading up to the election did not help ease Turkey's volatile political climate. Last Wednesday, Turkish police raided the offices of an opposition media company and forced two TV stations that had already been taken off the air to stop broadcasting on the Internet.

The move was in line with the oppressive media policies Erdogan adopted after his party lost in June. Journalists are regularly detained, and publications, under pressure, have been firing reporters whose work is critical of the government.

Content is routinely removed from Twitter, which is sometimes blocked entirely.

"Whether or not there will be more oxygen in the system for journalists will depend on the result of Sunday's elections," Asli Aydintasbas, a journalist for around 20 years, told Reuters last week.

Much like the tension brewing in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, restrictions on press freedom are unlikely to ease.

"Sunday's election results pave the way for a Putin-style presidency in Turkey," Schanzer said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin's despotic tendencies.

In terms of censorship, however, Erdogan's Turkey may be even worse than Putin's Russia: Twitter reported in August that it had received 408 court orders and another 310 requests from Turkish government authorities to remove content "based on violations of personal rights and other local law"' - more than 10 times as many as in Russia.

And Erdogan's authoritarian behavior seems to have been rewarded at the ballot box.

"The AKP used the five-month run-up to the snap elections to crack down on opposition NGOs and businesses, take over critical media, and intimidate journalists and opposition figures, and this strategy has seemed to produce significant gains for Erdogan," Erdemir wrote in an op-ed for Politico Europe.

"He will most likely try to settle scores with the remaining critical media, businesses and NGOs, thus further undermining Turkey's democracy, rights and freedoms, and rule of law," he added. "The next general elections, expected to take place in 2019, could end up being the most unfair and fraudulent elections to date."