Turkey's March 30 local elections had repercussions beyond the nation's borders, just as each vote cast into thousands of ballot boxes did not simply determine local governments or boost the ruling party's self-confidence.The most recent local elections were more than just an election. Let me explain. Turkey is not necessarily a Middle Eastern country, but the dominance of identity politics is something that the nation has in common with its neighbors in the region.As such, we could not in good conscience argue that Turkish politics, much like those throughout the Middle East, is immune to the global competition over power and influence.The question is whether the selfidentified Muslim majority will govern itself or leave political power to a small minority united by its Western lifestyle.If you have a positive answer to my first question, then it should be possible to fit this perspective within the broader notion of democratic government. A positive answer to the latter question, however, would hardly allow for anything but a dictatorship or, at best, a form of guardianship regime.Following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, a new class of power-holders in the Middle East and Turkey presented the people with a choice between dictatorship and guardianship. The lack of alternatives stemmed from two factors: exploiting the region's vast fossil fuel reserves and protecting the state of Israel. The reasoning was quite simple as democratic governments in the Middle East would have to serve the interests of the majority with regard to the use of oil among other issues, an arrangement that would have hurt Western interests in the region and leave Israel faced with serious problems. Securing both sets of vital interests would have been rather difficult, if not outright impossible, compared to dictatorial or tutelary regimes, even though the more challenging path would have done more justice to the region's people, the West, Israel's legitimate right to survive and world peace.However, short-term gain and easy solutions rapidly gained traction among the powers that-be of the time.It was more or less the same reasoning that led to a reversal of the wave of democratization that began with the Arab Spring revolutions. Instability once again rose in Tunisia and elsewhere to make sure that new guardianship regimes would root out democratically elected governments. While establishing a proper democracy proved elusive in Libya, a military coup overthrew the Egyptian government. Meanwhile, various countries made sure that the Syrian regime could stand years of civil war and violence.In Turkey, similar class dynamics and objectives came into play against the backdrop of Gezi Park protests and the Dec. 17 operation. Turks, however, were quick to recognize a pattern between developments in their country and elsewhere thanks to their long and painful experiences from past years when the government succeeded in tackling such challenges without compromising Turkish democracy. To the political leadership's credit, efforts to explain large-scale developments to the people proved quite successful as millions of voters joined together to stand with the government to build a wall of democratic legitimacy around their elected representatives.The March 30 elections effectively established beyond all doubt that anti-democratic political operations had no chance of survival in the region, as well as that peace could not come to this part of the world without democracy. Western observers of the Middle East must, therefore, concentrate more on democratic processes and less on Western lifestyles in their regional analyses.