Stockholm syndrome or a demand for stability?

How did the Justice and Development Party (AKP) secure an election victory on Sunday that even it was not expecting? How could a 13-year ruling party, which scored 40.8 percent in an election just five months ago, recuperate to reach almost 50 percent in repeat polls?

Did the Turkish nation become so masochistic as to vote for a political clan that has been systematically destroying the very foundations of the country's secularist, pluralist democracy? Or has the nation fallen in love with a clan that has hijacked its democratic will in exchange for political and economic stability?

The answer to all and similar questions perhaps lies in the traumatic five months that Turkey has gone through since the June vote, which for the first time in 13 years saw an AKP without a parliamentary majority. On June 5, just two days before the last election, twin bombs did not only rattle the Diyarbak?r rally ground of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). The wider impact of the blasts, which killed four people and left over 200 others in hospital, was to plunge the entire country into a chaotic, traumatic period.

The execution-type murders of security officers in their beds, in front of bank ATMs, or in markets while shopping with their wives, and the subsequent revival of separatist terrorist attacks on military posts, sending the body bags of loved ones every day to western Turkey, sent the country back into the "dark days." It had almost forgotten about such days since the start in April 2013 of the "non-confrontation" period, as part of the "Kurdish opening."

Although it could not win a sufficient majority to form a single-party government in June, President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) did not...