ISTANBUL - The face is everywhere. It's on the coinage, on the new 10 million lira notes and on the old 10 million lira notes, which today are worth about 60 cents.

It glares from the walls of city buildings, from niches inside the frenzied bazaars, everywhere in the twisty streets of Istanbul, on both the European and Asian sides of the Bosporus. It looks down upon every school child in Turkey, an intimidating visage, stern, but not necessarily disapproving, perhaps even inspiring.

It is the death mask of Mustafa Kemal, who named himself Ataturk, father of the Turks.

Ataturk, who drove out the predatory foreigner after Turkey's defeat in World War I and founded the modern Turkish state in 1923. This he built on a constellation of principles, which many people fear may be threatened by the outcome of Sunday's election.

The principles that Ataturk stood for were modernity, democracy, equality of the sexes, the embrace of the West's values and even of its style. He abolished the Arabic script, made the Turks abandon the fez and turban for Western hats; he stripped the veils from the faces of Turkish women and even allowed that a nominally Muslim man had a right to a drink now and then.

Because Mustafa Kemal hated obscurantist religion, and to effect all this, he based his state on an enabling principle: secularism. This became the matrix from which modern Turkey grew, much as the infinitely beautiful and complex patterns of a Turkish carpet grow out of the interminable knotting through its warp and woof.

The triumph Sunday of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, which won enough votes to form a new government without help from any other party, would seem to strike at Ataturk's basic idea. Mr. Erdogan, once a competent mayor of Istanbul who was jailed for reciting a poem, is animated by religious notions; his party is the reincarnation of another religious party (Muslim, of course) long banned. Mr. Erdogan is prohibited from participating in the government, which is also trying to outlaw his party.

Turkey is a land of earthquakes, and certainly what occurred on Sunday could be described as the political equivalent. It was definitely a repudiation of the abiding political class - those who have claimed to be Ataturk's executors over the years but who are widely regarded as corrupt, manipulative, anti-democratic. The vote was an outburst of the people's disgust.

Five days before the election, a young guide here told his group of foreign tourists: "As you can see by all the little flags, we are having an election. It always involves the same people. When I was a child in school, they were there. When I went to university, they were there. When I got married, they were there, the same ones. Now that I am working, they are still there. My children will probably wind up voting for their children."

Suddenly, it seems, they are no longer there. The party of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit was virtually annihilated. When the voting was over, the only other party among the 18 that participated that remained viable was that founded by Ataturk himself, the Republican People's Party. It finished a distant second to Justice and Development. Turkey today is virtually a two-party state.

Now perhaps something can be done about the economy, the unemployment, the inflation. And now perhaps the mandarins of the political-military establishment, who always had the last word in Turkish political life, those who constitute the so-called "invisible hand" behind the state, might re-examine that stealth role they have been playing for so long.

In fact, the seismic nature of this election could present more opportunity than instability. Mr. Erdogan has promised to preserve the secular state and to pursue the drive toward the West initiated by Ataturk: His party, he says, favors entry into the European Union. This would be the ultimate fulfillment of Ataturk's project.

Toward that end, Turkey has already banned capital punishment, improved its human rights performance and taken stringent measures to bring down an inflation rate nearing 50 percent this year. But the one thing that would and can forestall that entry is, oddly enough, the hold the armed forces maintain over the country, which compromises its democracy. Thus, the country is being held back by the very institution Ataturk loved, the instrument that helped him bring the Turkish republic to life.

And there is another felicitous outcome at least possible. Somewhere, some leader or political party will succeed in establishing a functioning state in which Islam and democracy rest comfortably together and thereby prove the flexibility of that ancient and much-maligned religion.

Should it be Turkey, I suspect that might even draw a smile from the ubiquitous face on the wall.

Richard O'Mara is a former foreign correspondent and foreign editor of The Sun.