ISTANBUL — Turkey’s Nov. 1 election gave the ruling Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., a major victory that nobody expected. The period of political uncertainty that began in June, when the A.K.P. lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 13 years, has ended. In other words, the past five months did not mark the beginning of the end of A.K.P. dominance, as the opposition hoped. They were merely a short intermission in the long-lasting dominance of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

How did the A.K.P. surge from 40.8 percent of the vote in June to 49.5 percent in just five months — without any fraud, as independent observers testified? One answer is the electorate’s concern for “stability.” In June, some previous A.K.P. supporters decided to punish the party for its arrogance, corruption and authoritarianism. Very soon, however, they began to worry that the country would become mired in instability. The resurgence of terrorism — by both the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., and the Islamic State — solidified the conviction that Turkey needs a firm hand at the helm.

Many critics, both in Turkey and the West, interpreted this recent wave of terror as a conspiracy by Mr. Erdogan to garner more votes. His supporters, on the other hand, interpreted it as a conspiracy against the president and his glorious “New Turkey.” Arguably, it was mostly unplanned chaos, created by the failure of the peace process between the government and the P.K.K., for which both sides are responsible, as well as the spillover of the war in northern Syria into Turkey, with Islamic State suicide bombings on pro-Kurdish gatherings.

Yet the government carefully exploited the chaos for its own propaganda purposes. Meanwhile, the P.K.K.’s relentless attacks on security forces discredited the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., whose liberal-left narrative got overshadowed by its assumed ties with the P.K.K. Consequently, the H.D.P. lost more than a million votes from terror-wary Kurds, most of which went to the A.K.P. At the other end of the spectrum, the M.H.P., the party of Turkish nationalists, also lost two million votes to Mr. Erdogan, mainly because of the astoundingly dull performance of its leader, Devlet Bahceli.