It was Monday morning, and in the café the TV was replaying coverage from the elections the night before.

We watched the flash-lit face of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking to reporters, victoriously addressing roaring crowds .

“Today begins a New Turkey!” Erdogan proclaimed.

“Yeni Turkey!” echoed the cook, who was wrapping my breakfast to go. He extended a hand for me to shake, which I did politely. The cashier, a younger man , was disappointed by the results. He’d wanted the opposition, I could tell. But the glow of victory belonged to the cook, and it would have been discourteous not to acknowledge his elation.

“A big day for Erdogan,” I conceded.

“Yes,” the cook said. “Erdogan is very authoritative.” He made a proud fist to accentuate his feelings.

Very authoritative, indeed. Here was a leader who was not even up for election – the elections were for mayoral and other municipal seats – and yet he was the newsmaker. The election had been a referendum on his ruling AK Party’s decade-long rule. The TV hardly bothered showing images of the victorious local leaders. It was all about Erdogan, and in the foreign press too. “Turkish PM claims victory,” read the BBC headline. “Erdogan cheers his party in local vote,” went CNN.

Still, the results of the election were numbing. The night before, my girlfriend and I had anxiously followed the returns, our hope quickly turning to dismay, to frustration, to anger and depression. By the end of the evening, AK Party had not only held off the opposition, but had in fact gained percentage points compared to the previous elections in 2009. Gained?

How was it that in the wake of months of anti-government protests, of alleged corruption scandals, of Erdogan’s recent censorship of social media sites like Twitter and YouTube, that his party could gain ground? We’d expected they’d lose at least a few percentage points. But no, they actually gained ground. It seemed like a bad dream. Unbelievable.

“Farewell to democracy,” said one friend, on Facebook.

That friend’s gloomy prediction – and he’s hardly alone in that – aside, one has to marvel at the resilience of the Turkish leader Erdogan; either he’s a very sly fox, or his supporters are, or else one or both of them are very dumb. It reminded me of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, when Bush managed to win a second term, despite having dragged the country into two wars. The problem in the U.S. at that time was that the opposition leader, John Kerry, couldn’t articulate to voters a clear alternative, and Bush managed to convince a nervous public to “stay the course.”

That pretty much sums up the results here in Turkey’s election. With Sunday looking to be a possible indictment of his leadership, Erdogan and his party instead survived and prospered at the polls because Erdogan was able to rally his supporters solidly behind him, to stay the course.

In recent months, he has campaigned tirelessly, so much so that he actually lost his voice in the days before the election and was forced on doctor’s orders to take a rest. But in that campaigning, Erdogan drew a line in the sand. He knew that it was his rule that was up for election on Sunday, not the mayor of Istanbul, nor the mayor of Ankara. Did Turkey want him, or did they want the protesters in Taksim Square running the country? Did they want to turn over the country to Twitter, or keep it in his hands? Did they want a foreign “plot” to undermine “the rise of Turkey?” Or did Turks trust Erdogan to continue leading the way? Erdogan skillfully framed the election in terms of “us versus them,” and in doing so, succeeded in galvanizing his supporters – who took him at his word.

Before heading to the polls this weekend, Erdogan told supporters to give his enemies the “Ottoman slap.”

“What’s the Ottoman slap?” I asked my girlfriend.

“That’s what fathers say to their children when they misbehave,” she said. “They say, ‘Do you want me to give you the old Ottoman slap?’”

I find it interesting and fitting that Erdogan chose such a phrase to rally his supporters. Throughout his 10-year rule, he has often cut himself in the image of a father figure, instructing and scolding Turks as though they were his children. He is the father who knows best, or thinks he does anyway. He says that each Turkish family should have at least three children. Imagine the U.S. president telling Americans how many children to have. But judging from Sunday’s results, a large number of Turks want a leader who is an authoritarian, who is strong and decisive, who will restore a “moral order.”

For many of us who watched the protests in Taksim Square last summer, and the more recent protests in the wake of the corruption scandal, Erdogan’s hold on the country seemed to be slipping. At times, he even appeared desperate. Likewise, Turkey seemed to be on the verge of a new age, one where the government would be held more accountable. At times, to me anyway, it felt a little like Turkey was having its own Summer of Love. Through Twitter, YouTube and other social media, the voices of millennials in particular seemed to hint at a more open, Western-style society just around the corner, just as the Arab Spring unrest seemed only a couple of years ago.

Now, with Twitter and YouTube banned (for now anyway), and the victorious Erdogan vowing to punish his enemies, it seems that Turkey in fact may be headed in an entirely different direction.

James Tressler was a reporter for The Eureka Times-Standard. His latest book, “Letters From Istanbul, Vol. 1,” is available at Lulu.com. He lives in Istanbul.