WORLD VIEW: When the mayor of the northern Italian town of Premana, Pietro Coverio, heard the news he ordered the town's flag to be lowered to half-mast. "The Turkish people have a right to vote for whomever they want," he announced condescendingly, "but the victory of an Islamic party in a country that could soon join the European Union threatens our Christian culture."
Coverio's sectarian interpretation of the result was echoed yesterday by the former president of France and current head of the Convention on the Future of Europe, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing who said in Le Monde that allowing Turkey into the EU would spell the end of the Union.
Their motivations notwithstanding, they are perhaps right to have recognised the huge significance of the election from an EU perspective. And, if anything, the victory of the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, may actually accelerate Turkey down its road to EU accession.
That is particularly so since the army on Tuesday indicated its willingness to accept the election result. It is perhaps a healthy sign that prosecutorial attempts to debar the AKP from office, like its leader, Recey Tayyip Erdogan, may not be successful.
Turkish voters, and now increasingly the state apparatus, appear to accept Erdogan's assurances that he has undergone a conversion to secularism and that the party can now be considered in the mould of the European centre right, albeit with an Islamic rather than Christian ethos.
The distinction between "Islamic" and "Islamist" is crucial. Only a few years ago Erdogan was a member of the Islamist Welfare Party which called for the introduction of Islamic religious, or sharia, law in Turkey. Erdogan, jailed in 1998 for inciting religious hatred, has in the past denounced ballet as "obscene" and spoken in favour of banning contraception and alcohol.
Turkey's a-la-carte Muslims, and the ever-vigilant army, would simply not put up with that, and the AKP's success is clearly predicated on that understanding.
Much like the leaders of the reformed communist parties of eastern Europe, the AKP's leaders have been through a process of public self-criticism and disavowal of their past, and most, but not all, observers say they must be taken at face value. And the party's transition will be watched closely, not least by other Muslim democrats in the region who are anxious to demonstrate the compatibility of Islam and pluralism.
Erdogan's enthusiasm for EU accession should reassure. He knows well that the EU's rigorous annual audit of compliance with EU legal and administrative standards has been sharply critical of Turkey's human rights record.
Progress in that field is a precondition for getting the date for the opening of accession talks which Ankara craves. Islamicisation of Turkish law would debar Ankara from membership.
Although the European Commission greeted the election with a chilly "we note" response, some EU diplomats are positively enthusiastic about the result. For one thing, I was told, "at least we are dealing with a single-party government not a coalition riven by differences."
The AKP's modernising zeal should be positively assisted by the fact, courtesy of the country's electoral system, that the only parliamentary opposition it faces, the Republican People's Party (CHP), will be on its secular left. This week the CHP pledged to work with the AKP to boost the country's EU accession process.
For another, the AKP's human rights agenda is actually likely to correspond to that of the EU's, and the party is seen as less likely to tolerate the sort of abuses the Kurds have put up with - the problem being that, unlike other European countries, the Turkish state apparatus, notably the military, has been decidedly independent of its government. Some tension can be expected.
The other problems in the EU-Turkey relationship are the ongoing Cyprus deadlock and Ankara's insistence that it should be involved intimately in the decision-making surrounding the use by the EU's Rapid Reaction Force of NATO assets. In Brussels, diplomats report some unusual enthusiasm on the part of the Greeks for the prospects of dealing with the new government once established. Greece takes over the EU Presidency from January, and a Simitis-Erdogan meeting is scheduled for next week.
Erdogan has already started to prepare his public for the reality that next month's EU summit is unlikely to promise a date to start accession talks. "This will not be the end," he said this week, insisting that Turkey's European vocation remained undimmed.