Article Scan – The AKP’s accountability crisis
The AKP’s accountability crisis
Turkey’s ruling party AKP (Justice and Development Party) prefers to be referred as the AK Party rather than AKP.
We do not say CH Party (CHP, the Republican People’s Party, the main opposition party) or MH Party (MHP, Nationalist Movement Party). Ak means white, pure, in Turkish, symbolizing mother’s milk, honesty, goodness, trustworthiness. All these were AKP’s promises.
In the early 2000s, Turkey was recuperating from a devastating financial crisis and the coalition governments of the 1990s were notorious for large-scale corruption. AKP provided an honest newcomer profile with an Islamic touch.
Several rumors of corruption broke even in the early years of AKP. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his family’s wealth were also an unpleasant subtitle of Wikileaks. When asked about his newly accumulated personal and family wealth, Erdogan’s usual answer has been, “Do not be jealous: Work hard and you can be successful, too.”
more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/12/akp-accountability-crisis.html#ixzz2nlAkhwXc
A challenge to Erdogan’s rule
It was one of the most audacious challenges ever to the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured), the Turkish prime minister. On December 17th police detained the sons of three of his cabinet ministers, a construction tycoon, and a mayor from his mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party in dawn raids carried out in Istanbul and Ankara as part of a corruption probe.
News of the detentions of around 49 people sent shockwaves throughout the political establishment and the Istanbul Stock Exchange’s main index fell by more than 2% amid news that the investigation had extended to a state-run lender, Halkbank.
The operation is seen as a further and dramatic escalation in the continuing power struggle between Mr Erdogan and Turkey’s most influential cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who commands a global empire of media outlets, schools and charities from self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania.
more: http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/12/turkish-politics
Turkey: lecturing not listening
A new Turkey has emerged during Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s years in charge. He and his party need to live with what they have created
Through all the disappointments that have followed the Arab spring, liberals inside and outside the Middle East have been able to say that Turkey was standing proof that Islam and democracy were compatible. But what has been happening recently suggests a critical examination of this belief is in order.
The harsher side of Turkey’s system was revealed to the world earlier this year when the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spectacularly mishandled a rally against a mall development in Gezi Park in Istanbul. He turned a demonstration that was initially about conservation and town planning into a nationwide protest against his style of rule, involving millions of people. Throughout the crisis, Mr Erdogan’s comments showed that he neither understood nor respected the views of his opponents. It was left to more moderate and politically sensitive members of his AK (Justice and Development) party to restore a measure of calm; but what could not so easily be restored was Mr Erdogan’s credit with a significant portion of the younger generation.
more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/turkey-recep-tayyip-erdogan
Enigmatic Turkish cleric poses challenge to Erdogan’s might / By Humeyra Pamuk
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has won three general elections, weathered summer riots, subdued a meddling army and changed Turkey like few leaders before him in a decade in power.
But a rift with an enigmatic U.S.-based Islamic preacher, whose quiet influence in the police, secret services and judiciary looms large over the Turkish state, threatens to shake his hold on power ahead of elections next year.
The powerful network of Fethullah Gulen, who leads a worldwide Islamic movement from a forested compound in the United States, had helped Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted AK Party win a growing share of the vote in three successive elections.
“This is a nasty and bloody divorce,” wrote Kadri Gursel, a columnist critical of the government but who writes for the broadly pro-Erdogan Milliyet daily.
