From protests to corruption: is Turkey's prime minister losing his touch?
Remember those protests in Turkey back in May and June?
They began over plans to destroy a park in Istanbul, but heavy-handed police tactics quickly turned them into demonstrations against the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.
The conventional wisdom back then was that Mr Erdogan, the most talented politician of his generation, would ride those protests out, and so it proved.
Whatever Turkish liberals said about him, Erdogan was democratically elected and his brand of populist Islamist conservatism combined with mercantile savvy meant he was unlikely to lose his grip on power.
In a blog at the time though, I suggested that something may have changed: “the leader is no longer invincible,” I wrote. “His party will question him; his ambition of assuming the presidency no longer seems quite so certain.”
Now comes further evidence that Erdogan’s kingdom is not as impregnable as he would like it to be.
On 17 December police detained some 80 people, including the sons of three of the PM’s cabinet ministers, in dawn raids as part of an investigation into corruption at the highest levels.
A furious Mr Erdogan railed against the police investigation.
He indirectly blamed Fethullah Gulen, part religious leader and part business mogul, who manages to exert extraordinary influence over Turkey’s commercial and political life from his home in Pennsylvania.
Turkey’s Prime Minister did not hesitate to strike back: five police chiefs in Istanbul and Ankara, presumed to be followers of Gulen, were removed from their posts.
During the summer protests, Erdogan backed firm police tactics; come the wintertime, and with his own cronies under suspicion, Erdogan has come up with the opposite response; one which reveals both the exent of the Turkish leader’s power and what the writer Christopher de Bellaigue in the latest “New York Review of Books” calls Erdogan’s “vindictive authoritarianism”.
This summer’s protests exposed to the world Erdogan’s Putin-like disdain for his critics.
The events of the last week suggest something far more serious: a power struggle at the heart of the Turkish political establishment.
Previously Erdogan took on the might of Turkey’s once meddlesome generals who used to stage military coups: now the Islamist political fortress Erdogan built in the generals’ place is looking weaker than ever before.
And irony of ironies, it is avowedly religious politicians, not their secular opponents, who stand accused of having their hands in the till.
Not since the trial of Turkish generals for alleged coup-plotting has a scandal grabbed bigger headlines, with the chief executive of a state-run bank reported to have kept $4.5m in cash stored in shoe boxes at his home.
All this may have a sobering effect on the Turkish electorate.
The Turkish newspaper columnist Semih Idiz has pointed out that Erdogan built his career on combating corruption – but now the son of his own interior minister has been arrested.
And the more vindictive Erdogan becomes in response to these corruption allegations, the weaker he may begin to look.
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