Victorious — and Banned

By law, Recep Tayyip Erdogan should not even be in politics. In 1998, the charismatic former mayor of Istanbul was convicted under Turkey's religious-hate-speech statutes for reciting a poem that contained the lines: "Our minarets are our bayonets, our believers are our soldiers." He served four months in jail and was banned from public office for life.

Yet last week the clean-cut populist was back. His pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AK) drubbed Turkey's secular old guard in the general election, amassing nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament — albeit with only one-third of the popular vote....