With Turkish officials resigning right and left over a corruption scandal, Kemal Kirişci unpacks the deepening political crisis in Turkey:
A graft scandal involving individuals close to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cabinet erupted on December 17. Subsequently, the government has removed a string of police chiefs and officers as well as members of the judiciary from their posts claiming that there is a “conspiracy” directed against the government. The PM referred to a long list of conspirators, including unnamed ambassadors that he threatened with expulsion. However, supporters of Erdogan have identified Fetullah Gülen, the head of a religiously conservative civil society movement that enjoys broad-based societal support and is alleged to have sympathisers in the ranks of the Turkish National Police and judiciary, as the primary culprit. Gülen, who has lived in the US since the late 1990s, was a long-time ally and supporter of the PM’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). Relations between the PM and Gülen’s movement had been deteriorating for some time on a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from relations with Israel to Erdogan’s recent attempt to have the lucrative prep schools shut down.
The corruption scandal comes at an unfortunate time for the government as Turkey enters an 18-month-long election cycle that will see local elections in March, presidential elections in August and a parliamentary one in mid-2015. The resulting instability from the corruption scandal also coincides with a period when Turkey’s international image has been tarnished and its foreign policy faces growing challenges in a deeply unstable neighbourhood.
Marc Champion sees signs that Erdogan is not as politically astute as he used to be:
Precisely because Erdogan has concentrated power so closely around himself in just a few men, any perception that they are corrupt will immediately infect his personal image and support. This is why Erdogan hasn’t fired the four ministers: He says the allegations against them are part of a plot to unseat him.
My guess is that he’s right, but his response gets to the second reason Erdogan may not survive, despite being far stronger than Gulen: himself. Erdogan is an extraordinary politician, one of the most intuitive I have met. Yet since the AK Party’s third thumping election victory in 2011, when he declared his “master period” to be at hand, Erdogan appears to have lost the political compass that once told him when to be pragmatic and cut his losses. His fight-or-flight response now includes only one — to fight.
In response to the allegations, Erdogan has fired dozens of Istanbul police chiefs involved in the arrests, the same ones he defended and praised over their handling of the Gezi Park protests earlier this year. He says the corruption cases are part of the same plot he detected behind the Gezi Park protests, conducted by the same dark morass of international conspirators. Except that now the police who cracked down on the protesters must be part of the conspiracy, too. This is just untenable. To make it stick and purge Gulen’s supporters from the police force, prosecutor’s office and courts, Erdogan will have to crack down in ways that will destroy what remains of Turkey’s independent law enforcement institutions and media freedoms. That will deal a huge blow to the so-called Turkish model, the idea that Turkey had cracked the code for implementing genuine democracy in the Muslim world. And that would be a tragedy, because the Turkish model is real and important, if overhyped, oversimplified and already under strain.
Michael Koplow thinks the prime minister may be done for:
If the AKP does worse than expected in the local elections in March, which is a very likely possibility, it seems to me that Erdoğan’s aura of invincibility and stranglehold on his party will be permanently broken. Once that happens the long knives are bound to come out, and with the perfectly acceptable alternative of Abdullah Gül waiting in the wings, Erdoğan’s tenure as the sun around which Turkish politics revolves (to quote my friend Steven Cook) may be done. While I have learned enough to know that Erdoğan should never, ever be counted out or underestimated, we may have finally arrived at the exception to this longstanding rule of Turkish politics.
Jack A. Goldstone puts a positive spin on the corruption probe:
Unfortunately, ALL emerging democracies tend to have considerable amounts of corruption (maybe make that ALL democracies, period. The United States had a recent case of a Congressmen found with wads of cash stuffed in his freezer, and Japan has recurrent corruption scandals). It is difficult, when people who have had no access to political power for a very long time suddenly come into very powerful positions for everyone to act like angels. It is inevitable that some people will succumb to the temptation to turn their positions into sources of income. That is why all respectable democratic regimes have vigorous investigative and judicial arms that are concerned to ensure that the law is followed and corruption is rooted out — even if that leads to people at the very highest levels of authority. Indeed, one measure of the degree to which a country is truly a well-functioning democracy is whether such investigations and the pursuit of corruption ends with low-level officials, or whether even the highest officials in the land are held accountable if they break the law. On that score, the current investigations are a sign of the maturing and truly democratic character of Turkey’s regime.
The Dish 