“It is becoming clear that Erdogan’s Turkey does not belong to Europe,” a prominent German politician, Andreas Scheuer, said after the Turkish leader accepted his party’s victory in the municipal ballot on Sunday not just as a personal vindication but a mandate for what an opponent called a “witch hunt” against his adversaries. “A country in which the government threatens its critics and tramples democratic values cannot belong to Europe,” Mr. Scheuer said.

“What happens next will worry many Turks as they hear Erdogan vowing to get even with his critics and opponents,” the columnist Simon Tisdall said in The Guardian. “That Turkey is now a deeply divided nation is only too clear. That Erdogan’s future actions may serve to deepen those divisions is the great fear.”

Since the creation of the modern state in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been caught in the overlapping dilemmas thrown into sharp relief by its geography. While it straddles Europe and Asia, only a fraction of its soil lies west of the Bosporus that divides the two continents. For all the boutiques and businesses of Istanbul that look west to Frankfurt and Milan, the country’s distant east surveys a much rougher neighborhood.

The effort to accede to the European Union — haltingly underway since 2005 — pulls at one set of reflexes, while Mr. Erdogan’s style tugs at another. Last year, he deployed the police against protesters in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. In December a major corruption scandal broke over his aides and his family. Just in recent weeks, his government has moved to block Twitter and YouTube — depicted as his enemies’ tools in a campaign to besmirch him with faked evidence of malfeasance.

But the elections on Sunday showed something else. While Western-looking, secular, middle-class Turks are frequently hostile to him, Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party still command the political bedrock among the working class and in the countryside where Islam — Turkey’s dominant faith — is strong.