In case you missed it, Turkey held an election yesterday and it certainly looks like their polling process is on the up and up considering what a shock wave the results produced. There was plenty of news coming out of the final numbers, and none of it was good for President Erdogan.

Turkish voters delivered a dramatic blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice Development Party on Sunday, with results showing it losing its majority in parliament.

And, in a historic first, a party dominated by ethnic Kurds surged into the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, marking a new moment in the evolution of Turkey’s democracy as well as a direct challenge to Erdogan’s own ambitions to consolidate power as president.

“This is a nuclear explosion in Turkish politics,” said Bulent Aliriza, an expert in Turkey at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Well, nuclear explosion might be leaning a just a tad bit towards hyperbole here, but it was clearly surprising. Erdogan’s JDP has been seen as fairly solid in their control over the nation even as Turkey has come under increasing international criticism and pressure over their failure to engage on the side of the good guys against ISIS. But if these results hold, it looks like there was some internal pressure as well. The fact that the Kurds made such a large move in the internal power structure speaks volumes and Erdogan may be forced to reconsider his options going forward. But will this really change anything? Jim Geraghty spent a lot of time in Turkey and is far more experienced than I on the subject. He’s not quite so sure.

AKP getting knocked around is good news, but my sense back when I was living in Ankara is that certain traits are baked into the cake of the Turkish political system no matter which party is running the show: a deep vein of paranoia that every other country is out to get Turkey, a wariness that enemies within are constantly at work (admittedly, sometimes true) . . . while at the same time, a strange naiveté about the country’s rough neighbors, particularly Syria and Iran, and an attitude towards Israel that is schizophrenic at best and nauseatingly anti-Semitic at worst.

Back when I was there, the only force in Turkish life that seemed to consistently have a clear view of the country’s real enemies and forces of destabilization — i.e., Iranian mullahs, Assad, Islamist extremists, and terror groups — was the Turkish military — and obviously not everyone in it. They tended to have a cordial, if not warm, relationship with the Israeli military — joint-training, etc.

How much of this is simply generalizations and assumptions about the rank and file people of Turkey and how much of it is real? Most stereotypes spring from a grain of truth and I’m fine with taking Geraghty at his word on that one. After all… he lived there and broke bread with them for more than a little while. There aren’t too many things you can rely on the Turks for except hating Greece, but Erdogan has ushered in a new, expanded era of nastiness, particularly as it applies to Israel.

The more surprising thing I took from Jim’s observations was about the military. I wasn’t aware that they were generally on such good terms with the IDF and saw them as brothers in arms. That’s certainly an uncomfortable contrast with their President, who would apparently rather see Israel moved to another continent. But what good does that do the western world even if it’s true? Turkey isn’t about to have its government toppled and replaced by some sort of military council the way Egypt did. And if it did, that would probably signal even more trouble in the region than we have now. The army isn’t likely to send itself off to war in Syria if they are holding down JDP dead enders and rival opposition groups on the home front.

Still, this may be cause for cautious optimism. If the native Kurds can carry enough influence with them to the halls of Turkish power, we may get a bit more cooperation from one of the premier military powers in the region. And seeing how ISIS is doing these days, we could use all the help we can get.