Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s formidable campaigning power is now directed at heading off a scandal calculated to do him maximum damage at a crucial point in his country’s political calendar. This week a tape recording supposedly of him talking to his son about hiding huge amounts of money from corruption investigators was posted online. He has denounced it as a forgery, but it is very close to the bone.
In power since 2002 by virtue of three outright general election victories, Mr Erdogan and his party have led a whirlwind of political change and economic growth. They have marginalised the country's dominant armed forces, affirmed the rights of provincial Islamic voters and elites against urban secularists, harnessed Turkey's ambitions to join the European Union to their domestic reforms and asserted its role in a turbulent region. They have also become so closely involved with the new commercial elite as to be utterly careless about this conflict of interests, increasingly resentful of criticism and arrogant in the use of power.
Last summer's Istanbul protest movement against property speculation exemplified the growing civic anger about this style of governing and was ruthlessly dismissed by Mr Erdogan. From quite a different direction – the followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic imam – there has come another threat to Erdogan's power. This movement has widespread support within the governing apparatus and sponsored a police investigation last December resulting in the resignation of four ministers and is the alleged occasion for this tape. Since then Mr Erdogan has arbitrarily fired police, change internet laws, restricted an already compliant media and passed an intelligence Bill to root this opposition out.
He has become too powerful and now endangers the many achievements of his years in office. But Turkey is polarised for and against him and lacks the legal and political resources to overcome these problems without more such scandals and convulsions.