AMID a frenzy of honking, a young woman leant out of the window of a car, one of the hundreds that besieged the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party in Ankara, making an Islamist salute with her left hand and an ultranationalist one with her right. Outside the building, thousands of cheering, singing AK supporters awaited their leader, fresh from his big victory at the polls. “This is Turkey’s new liberation,” yelled a man hoisting a flag emblazoned with the image of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the coat of arms of the Ottoman empire, his voice barely audible over the din. “The West will not boss us around,” said another man, a schoolteacher. It was the evening of June 24th, day one of what Mr Erdogan calls the New Turkey, a synthesis of Islamic nationalism and Ottoman nostalgia, and possibly the last day of the old republic founded by Kemal Ataturk.

Hours earlier, despite predictions of a much closer race, Mr Erdogan and his party, plus their ultranationalist allies, scored a double knockout in Turkey’s elections. In the presidential contest, the Turkish strongman defeated the main opposition hopeful, Muharrem Ince, by taking about 53% of the vote, compared with Mr Ince’s 31%. In the parliamentary vote, his AK party and its coalition partner, the hardline Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), won a combined total of 54%, enough to ensure a comfortable majority with 344 seats out of 600 in the assembly. The opposition alliance, led by Mr Ince’s CHP and the Iyi party, won just 189 seats. The pro-Kurdish HDP won 12%, enough to clear the electoral threshold and send 67 of its members to parliament.

Though free, it was the most unfair election in Turkey in decades. Under pressure from government cronies, most news outlets pretended that two of the main candidates, Selahattin Demirtas of the HDP and Meral Aksener of Iyi, did not exist. The main national broadcaster and its sister channels offered Mr Ince less than a tenth of the airtime devoted to Mr Erdogan, and ignored his last rally, attended by hundreds of thousands of supporters, on the eve of the vote. A report by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe welcomed the high (88%) voter turnout, but concluded that Mr Erdogan and AK had enjoyed excessive media coverage, misused state resources and used the state of emergency to restrict the freedoms of assembly and expression.

For Mr Erdogan, the victory marks the last step on the road to a constitution that replaces the parliamentary system put in place by Ataturk, the country’s founding father, with a presidential one. Under the new changes, adopted by a slim majority in a 2017 referendum and now in effect, Mr Erdogan has complete control of the executive, including the power to issue decrees, appoint his own cabinet, draw up the budget, dissolve parliament by calling early elections, and pack the bureaucracy and the courts with political appointees. The office of prime minister will disappear.

The president’s supporters say the new system will speed up decision-making, further reduce the army’s ability to meddle in politics and make unstable parliamentary coalitions a thing of the past. His opponents say the constitution means Mr Erdogan no longer presides over a government, but a regime.

The only conceivable check on the president’s powers, parliament, is now in the hands of his AK and its ally, the MHP, which took 11% of the vote, about twice as much as most polls had predicted. Mr Erdogan’s party, of which he is absolute master, will ensure that whatever comes out of the president’s mouth becomes law. The MHP and its septuagenarian leader, Devlet Bahceli, who went from calling Mr Erdogan a dictator to becoming one of his biggest cheerleaders, will pull him even further to the nationalist right.