AUSTIN BAY: Turkish Election a Model for Secular Arab Spring Revolutionaries.

In nationwide parliamentary elections held June 7, Turkish voters rejected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “soft Islamist” power grab. In doing so, Turks strengthened their secular republic’s democratic system and provided the globe with an example of democratic temperance.

Turkey deserves congratulations and, in the world’s hard corners, political emulation. Using the ballot box — change the right way — Turks ended almost 13 years of single-party parliamentary domination by Erdogan’s moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

Curbing Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian ambitions not only is good news for Turkey but also makes a global statement about democratic resilience and the wisdom of free, informed voters when faced with difficult choices.

Culturally Islamic nations desperately need inclusive secular political models and free market development models. To the dismay of the Islamic State group’s homicidal caliph and al-Qaida terrorists, the Turkish election demonstrates that a secular, democratic political system in a culturally Islamic society can be strong and confident enough to halt its most powerful leader when the ego-tripping head of state is in the process of going rogue.

Turkey’s achievement has immense implications for the Middle East and, for that matter, the whole developing world. One of the major questions the Arab Spring posed in 2011 is how to modernize culturally Islamic nations. Islamic State modernity requires a strict seventh- or eighth-century religious social order (complete with ritual beheadings). However, it gets to possess 21st-century weapons and employ social media propagandists. Islamic State economics, beyond subsistence agriculture, amounts to the caliph’s magnanimously dispensing loot and pillage to the faithful. What the caliph says goes, or his thugs kill you.

In contrast to this tribal violence and rule by the big man’s whim, Turkey’s democratic revolution, launched in 1923 by Turkey’s republican founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, offers stability, freedom and prosperity.

Sadly, not everybody wants those.