Turkey’s widespread corruption scandal has Erdogan’s party and the Islamists splintering.
[...] The Gulenist movement is, then, hardly less radical than Erdogan’s AKP, but the falling-out between the two groups is real. It’s most evident in Erdogan’s decision to do away with the thousands of lucrative private schools, known as dershane in Turkish, that prepare students for university-admissions exams. The Gulen movement is said to control 75 percent of these schools, which reportedly number 3,100, employ 100,000 Turks, and educate 2 million students at a time. They represent huge opportunities for recruitment and indoctrination for Gulen’s movement and, with tuitions over $11,000 a year, a huge source of income, too.
The war between the two Islamist camps is thus much less about ideology, as many Western pundits aver, than it is about power and money. This is more like a turf fight between two Mafia dons than a feud between two different sects of Islam. The stakes are particularly high for Erdogan: He is, in effect, the real target of the corruption probe the Gulenists launched, and there is more than a kernel of truth in his characterizing it as a “political assassination attempt.”
No less is at stake for Gulen. Erdogan’s far-reaching purges of top police and judiciary officials have already weakened the movement, even before a widely expected second massive assault on the movement’s members and the closing of its prep schools takes place. In case one is tempted to empathize with Erdogan’s targets, it is worth remembering that the Gulenists were the prosecutors and police thugs that sent hundreds of journalists and military members to jail on trumped-up Ergenekon and Sledgehammer charges and suppressed 2013’s peaceful Gezi protests with unprecedented brutality.
A new and important twist to the conflict: A few days before the end of 2013, the top political adviser to the prime minister, Yalcin Akdogan, accused the Gulen movement of supporting the trials of the “Ergenekon” and “Sledgehammer” conspiracies, which sent hundreds of top military members and veterans, along with many journalists and civilians, to jail on completely bogus charges. Only three days later, in the military’s first overtly political act in a long time, it filed a criminal complaint for a retrial of these officers, contending they had been convicted with fabricated and manipulated evidence. While this is undoubtedly an AKP gesture designed to win the support of the military, few in Turkey have forgotten Erdogan’s eager support of the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trains, and his full support for the kangaroo courts that sent the military “conspirators” to prison.
Though we’re still at an early stage in the feud, two conclusions could already be safely drawn: With a wide fault now open in the AKP between Erdogan and Gulen supporters, it is very unlikely that the party will in the future get anywhere near the 50 percent of the vote it got in the last elections, which gave him a level of political strength unparalleled in modern Turkish history. Erdogan now has little hope of changing Turkey into a presidential republic with himself in charge for another decade or so. Second, and perhaps more important, with the exoneration of the military establishment now seemingly just a matter of time, the corruption scandal and the earlier abuse of judicial power could do lasting damage to the Islamist ideology in Turkey.
