This was supposed to be the year when Recep Erdogan would finally come to grief. Instead, he has defied the odds and won today’s runoff in the Turkish presidential election with 52 per cent of the votes vs 48 per cent for 74-year-old opposition leader Kemal Kiliçdaroglu. This establishes Erdogan as one of the great political survivors, whose personal popularity has risen over the declining stature of his party. And it all but kills off the hope that reformist Turks had for change.

Anyone who has visited Turkey recently will know the mayhem that Erdogan’s rule has introduced. When I was last there, inflation was so bad that shops didn’t have price tags as they changed from morning to afternoon. There was hope that this time, surely, especially after the earthquake, things were so bad that his 22-year-old rule would come to an end. There was even a likely challenger in the form of Ekrem Imamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul. But when he was convicted of a trumped-up speech offence last December, and eliminated from the running, the 74-year-old Kiliçdaroglu was left as the only hope.

Independent monitors have declared the actual elections fair, but how fair was any election when the more likely challenger was barred from standing? Turkey is now an authoritarian state – insulting the president and government is not only a crime but one for which 16,000 people were convicted last year alone. Even then, Erdogan didn’t make it over the line in the first round of the elections.

When I speak of the ‘real hope’ that Erdogan’s rule would end, I’m referring to the people I spoke to in places that westerners tend to visit: cities like Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, where Ataturk’s portrait hangs in the shops, and people loathe the creeping return of religious, conservative and nationalist forces. Those forces are strong in Turkey (hence the first-round success of Ogan, an insurgent candidate from a far-right party).

On the campaign trail, Erdogan’s allies were billing this as an election where patriotic Turks would rebuff the West – represented by Kiliçdaroglu, who wanted democratic repair, restoration of independence to institutions like the central bank, the release of political prisoners etc. He’d improve relations with Europe and the West, reviving Turkey’s application to join the EU. ‘The will of the people to change an authoritarian regime has emerged, despite all the pressures’ said Kiliçdaroglu. He’s right, but that will was defeated by the more toxic brew (and underhand tactics) that Erdogan served up. A reminder that it’s wrong to think of Islam, religiosity, and social conservatism as forces of the past – these are the forces now shaping Turkey and deciding its future. It was a tight power struggle and an unfair fight, but Erogan has the upper hand.

Erdogan campaigned as a world leader who has given Turkey a military and political footprint that it just didn’t have before. He expanded its influence in Africa and the Middle East and became a powerbroker in the Ukraine war – arming Ukraine while tightening bonds with Moscow. He is saying that Turkey matters, now: thanks to him. A message his supporters lap up.

Tonight, victorious, he is promising ‘the century of Turkey’ but it will be a less liberal one. This year marks the centenary of the Ataturk revolution. And like Ataturk, Erdogan has transformed the Turkish state in his own image – a Nato and G20 member that has rejected the West. It’s amazing to think that in a country where it’s illegal to insult the president, 48 per cent still voted for his aged opponent. But at the end of it all, Erdogan has survived – and his country has scant hope that the economic crisis will end any time soon.