Though a bill to reform the Turkish education system included provisions to shutter test-prep schools-many of which are owned by Gülenists-opposition remained muted. During the following year, tensions remained subdued. Whatever the truth of such theories, power struggles between the AKP and Gülenists in the bureaucracy became more serious in early 2012 when prosecutors (allegedly Gülenists) sought to frustrate efforts by Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency to negotiate with the Kurdistan Workers Party. As Erdoğan intrigued to protect the team’s management, many came to view the entire prosecution as an attempt by Gülenists to put their own men on the team’s board of directors. As Fenerbahçe also happened to be Prime Minister Erdoğan’s favorite team, the prosecutor initiating the investigation was generally viewed to be a tool of Gülen and subsequent developments in the case were often filtered through the lens of political struggle. The most serious disagreement before 2012 related to football: in 2011, the leadership of Fenerbahçe, one of Istanbul’s three main football teams, was accused of match fixing. ĭespite much chatter about potential splits, tensions remained submerged. Shared interests helped to paper over many disagreements: Gülenists, for example, emphasize inter-faith dialogue, and have tended to oppose the AKP’s hardening stance toward Israel by contrast, they adhere to a “Turkish” nationalism that leads them to distrust the government’s concessions to ethnically Kurdish Turks. For years, the two worked in harmony the AKP allowing Gülenists access to key positions within the government and Gülenists using the power of these positions to prosecute AKP opponents. Suffice it to say, tensions had been building for quite some time between the AKP and followers of Fethullah Gülen, a popular religious leader whose supporters control a vast network of businesses, including media conglomerates. The “December 17th” corruption scandal, which dominated Turkish news for months, has already been summarized excellently by the usual suspects. Regulation as a Weapon: Television and Newspapers Significantly, unlike previous existential challenges-a threatened coup in 2007, a legal attempt to shut the party in 2008, or even the massive protests that shook Turkish cities in mid-2013-this challenge has come from within the party and called into question nearly all of the pillars on which its electoral success rest. With only a month until local elections, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) seems set to weather its most serious challenge in more than half a decade. The following day, Bozdağ announced that there was still uncertainty whether the ministers under investigation had committed “crimes regarding their duties” or “personal crimes”-an important distinction given that parliamentarians have a large degree of immunity. Nonetheless, on February 16th, the Turkish parliament passed a bill restructuring the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), the institution tasked with overseeing the Turkish judicial system. Recent months have seen several bloody fights in the chambers of parliament as well as official complaints leveled against Bozdağ himself. That, in a matter of months, Bozdağ seems to have cauterized the wound and stabilized the patient is quite an accomplishment. The sons of three ministers had been arrested on corruption charges implicating their fathers the mayor of an Istanbul district had been detained on charges that he took bribes endangering a massive transportation project and public safety a businessman with ties to the prime minister’s son had been arrested and rumors were flying that a second wave of arrests was forthcoming. It could hardly have been otherwise: when he assumed the office on December 25th, his party was badly injured with little sense of how to stem the bleeding. Bekir Bozdağ, Turkey’s new Justice Minister, spent his first several months on the job performing duties more reminiscent of an emergency room surgeon than of a nation’s top law-enforcement official.
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