It’s been a week since Turkey’s AKP, the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, won 317 seats in the 550-member parliament — a good enough result to return the country to single-party rule, but short of the 330 needed to amend the nation’s secular constitution. Last June’s election saw the Kurds make parliament inroads to reduce the AKP to a minority — hence last week’s fresh election. Erdogan is bent on drafting a new constitution that would give him greater powers. Rightfully, opposition parliamentarians are concerned over the prospect that this could easily devolve into authoritarian rule.

And given Erdogan’s religious outlook, any new constitution could very well undermine the secular principles of the modern Turkish state, creating a potential flashpoint with the military — long endorsed as the guardians of the principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It was he who crafted the Republic of Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and laid down those all-important secular principles.

Erdogan has for long been pushing to redraft the governmental framework, wanting a US-style executive model to increase the breadth and scope of presidential powers. Last week’s election results meant that the AKP fell short of an absolute majority in parliament, a scenario that would have allowed Erdogan’s constitutional reforms to proceed on parliamentary approval. Now, his plan will have to be approved by referendum.

Turkey’s allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation have every reason to voice alarm over the deteriorating state of democracy and free speech. And when Erdogan complains about the European Union dragging its feet on Ankara’s membership to the bloc, that application has faltered in part over reservations about the direction and manner of his rule.

While the new government is signalling that it is open to reviving peace talks with the Kurds after an election that was marked by an escalation in a decades-old conflict, that escalation came as a result of a U-turn by Erdogan — one moment a peace-maker, the next ordering direct air strikes!