'New' Turkey: crisis and imagined enemies

It is a noteworthy fact that good governance in the contemporary world is possible through principles like transparency, accountability and the rule of law. These principles are inherent in the countries having a liberal democratic regime. In such countries, every political actor and institution has the responsibility to obey the legal rules and norms and hold the principle of accountability, which plays a major role in combating probable corruption and power abuses.

In the context of Turkey, the above-stated principles like that of the rule of law have unfortunately been just out of applicability and the “law of power-holders” used to dominate the political arena. However, the recent developments and the detentions of the sons of some ministers along with the detentions of public figures and top bureaucrats and the imprisonment of some of them have revealed that in Turkey, accountability and the rule of law have become practicable for the power-holders too.   

Indeed, this corruption case can be seen as a hopeful development for combating dirty political games and can be regarded as a sign of normalization. However, the recent developments also make many people feel sorry and upset because a political party seeing herself as the party of the oppressed people, as the voice of the will of nation and consisting of the so-called pious figures is seen as suspects and even agents of corruption and bribery.

In the meantime, while the judicial process is going on, the government has removed some particular police chiefs and this has been treated as a political intervention into the judicial process which shadows the reliability of the judicial process. In addition, the government exercised censorship on investigative journalist Mehmet Baransu's news website too, which is a serious blow to freedom of expression and free and independent media.

Beginning with the Gezi protests, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has started to lose legitimacy and the latest corruption crisis can be seen as the crystallized version of the loss of AK Party hegemony. If the judicial process fails and justice cannot be achieved in a satisfactory way,  this would really shoot democracy in the foot and the “imagined internal and external enemies” paranoia of the AK Party government would be the main stimulating factor for this political decay in the “new” Turkey.