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3 Turkish Ministers Resign Amid Corruption Scandal Turkish Corruption Scandal Moves Closer to Erdogan
(about 4 hours later)
Three Turkish cabinet ministers resigned on Wednesday in an intensifying corruption scandal that has challenged the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and polarized the country. One of the departing ministers called for Mr. Erdogan’s resignation as well. ISTANBUL — A corruption investigation that has encircled the Turkish government moved an ominous step closer to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday, as three top ministers whose sons have been implicated abruptly resigned — and one of them, on his way out the door, said Mr. Erdogan should step down as well.
Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler, both of whose sons have been arrested in the anticorruption investigation, stepped down. Their sons are among 24 people who have been arrested on bribery charges in a corruption investigation that has engulfed Mr. Erdogan and his close associates. The triple resignation, coming only hours after the ministers welcomed Mr. Erdogan at the airport as he returned from Pakistan late Tuesday, was enough in itself to inspire new talk of a deepening crisis, which Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly denounced as a foreign plot.
Hours later, Erdogan Bayraktar, the environment and urban planning minister, announced his resignation in an interview with the private NTV television network. Mr. Bayraktar’s son was detained as part of the corruption probe but later released. “I believe the prime minister should also resign,” Mr. Bayraktar said. But the seemingly spiteful utterance from one of the departing ministers was considered stunning, coming from a political party known for silencing dissent. That instantly raised the significance of the entire inquiry and left members of the Turkish public wondering if they are witnessing the collapse of their Islamist-rooted government of the last decade.
Mr. Erdogan’s government has denounced the inquiry as a politically motivated plot by a “criminal gang” within the state. The prime minister’s allies have also characterized it as a foreign plot to undermine Turkey’s rise and damage the government ahead of elections in March. Responding to the investigation, the government has dismissed more than a dozen high-ranking police officials as part of a purge of those it believes are behind the probe. “Now it seems the situation has changed completely,” said Kerem Oktem, a Turkey expert and research fellow at the European Studies Center at the University of Oxford. “It seems the ring around Erdogan has gotten tighter.”
The investigation has been linked to the followers of Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive Muslim preacher who lives in Pennsylvania and leads an influential Islamic movement. He has millions of followers and an expansive network of business, media outlets and schools, as well as sympathizers who are believed to have a strong influence over Turkey’s police and judiciary. Later, as a dramatic day came to a close, Mr. Erdogan emerged from a late-night meeting with President Abdullah Gul at the presidential palace in Ankara, the Turkish capital, and announced that seven other ministers would leave his cabinet, some of whom are departing as part of a long planned shuffle so they can run for mayors in upcoming elections. One of the late-night resignations included the European Union minister, has been implicated in the corruption investigation.
In the past, the Gulen movement has provided vital support to the conservative, Islam-inspired government of Mr. Erdogan, and the Gulen-affiliated news media have attacked common opponents and backed controversial trials that Mr. Erdogan publicly supported. But in recent years, it appears a rift has grown between the men, as Mr. Gulen has challenged Mr. Erdogan in key areas, including foreign policy. The investigation became public a week ago with dawn police raids on the offices of businessmen and others close to the prime minister. But Wednesday was the first time that someone who had been in Mr. Erdogan’s hierarchy — a confidante, no less – left the strong implication of the prime minister’s entanglements in some of the real estate deals at the heart of the case.
Mr. Gulen, who rarely gives interviews, has emphatically denied any involvement in the investigation. His sympathizers have also said that the characterization of Mr. Gulen as an influential puppet master over the Turkish state are exaggerated and aimed at undermining the movement. The crisis strikes a sharp contrast to the image Turkey has projected as an exemplar of a prosperous, Muslim-majority country based on democratic principles. A NATO member, Turkey has been embraced by the United States and Europe as a force for stability in the tumultuous Middle East, and the country has sought to play an important role in shaping the outcome of crises in Syria, Egypt and Iran’s nuclear program. With Mr. Erdogan now preoccupied with political survival, Turkey’s role in the region and its relationship with the West are in question.
The investigation, which has been directed at sons of government ministers, municipal workers and businessmen, including a powerful construction tycoon, began last week with a series of dawn raids on the offices of businessmen close to the prime minister. The Turkish news media reported that $4.5 million in cash was found packed in shoe boxes in the home of the chief executive of a state-run bank, while a money-counting machine and piles of bank notes were reported to have been discovered in the bedroom of a government minister’s son. The corruption inquiry has targeted the ministers’ sons, a major construction tycoon with links to Mr. Erdogan and municipal workers, and centers in part on allegations that officials received bribes in exchange for ignoring zoning rules and approving contentious development projects. No one has been convicted, but the issue has struck a nerve among the Turkish public, especially Istanbul residents, who have become increasingly resentful over the dizzying pace of development and riches amassed by a new, pious economic elite, with a strong hand in the construction industry, that rose to power alongside Mr. Erdogan and his associates.
The inquiry could prove to be one of the most potent challenges yet to Mr. Erdogan’s government, which was buffeted this summer by large demonstrations in a cherished Istanbul park by mostly liberal and secular-minded protesters who were angry at what they perceived as Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies. Analysts questioned whether Mr. Erdogan’s strategy of containing the damage by blaming foreign powers, appealing to the religious sentiments of supporters and evoking the ghosts of Turkey’s past by likening the crisis to the war for independence it fought after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, is enough to weather the crisis.
Mr. Erdogan’s intervention in the inquiry has drawn criticism from within his Justice and Development Party and threatens to undermine the unity of the party, known for its discipline, before a series of elections scheduled for the next 18 months. The Wednesday developments came amid rumors in the local media that more damaging allegations from the investigation were forthcoming and link directly to Mr. Erdogan and his family.
“We can see the prime minister is trying to take precautions against something that could be bigger,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the head of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research organization. Mr. Unluhisarcikli said that as the investigation inches closer to Mr. Erdogan personally, he will, “have more difficulty containing the damage.”
The public has been riveted by a flow of sordid details of the investigations leaked to the press – with photographs of piles of cash in the bedroom of a minister’s son and reports that the chief executive of a state-owned bank had $4.5 million in cash packed in shoeboxes.
Another major worry for Mr. Erdogan now is that anger with his administration will spread to the streets, as it did last summer with the violent suppression of demonstrators trying to protect a beloved Istanbul park from development. On Wednesday night sporadic protests erupted in some neighborhoods of Istanbul and other cities, with people calling on the government to resign and shouting: “Everywhere bribery! Everywhere corruption!”
On Wednesday morning, Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler, whose sons are among 24 people arrested in the corruption investigation, stepped down. A few hours later the environment and urban planning minister, Erdogan Bayraktar, closest among the three to Mr. Erdogan, said in a live television interview that he had resigned under pressure. He also said Mr. Erdogan was personally involved in unspecified property deals that are a focus of the investigation.
“The prime minister has the right to work with the ministers he prefers,” said Mr. Bayraktar. “But I can’t accept this pressure on me to resign. The prime minister too has to resign.”
Soli Ozel, a columnist and professor at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University, said, “this is extraordinarily dramatic. Bayraktar was someone who was very close to the prime minister. This is someone you’d expect to fall on his sword without question.”
The resignations came after a dramatic week in which Mr. Erdogan’s government sought to purge the police forces of those it believes are behind the investigation, which has been linked to Fethullah Gulen, a popular Muslim spiritual leader in exile in Pennsylvania who has millions of followers in Turkey, including some who hold high positions within the police and judiciary. Mr. Erdogan and others have called them a “criminal gang” and a “state-within-a-state.”
In a televised speech Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Erdogan used some of his strongest language yet to denounce his former allies in the Gulen movement and promised to dismiss them. “We will root out the bad apples or whatever is necessary,” he said.
Dozens of high-level police officials, and hundreds of other officers, already have been removed. Reports emerged in the Turkish press on Wednesday that prosecutors are pursuing other high-level officials, but that new police officials installed by the government have resisted pursuing them. This indicates that Mr. Erdogan’s government has enjoyed more success in clamping down on the police than it has the judiciary, and essentially highlights a power struggle within state structures.
Turkey has faced many upheavals, with coups and crass power struggles that sometimes turned violent, but the current crisis is something new: a clash between two Islamist rivals that had once been united in reforming the political system by pushing the military from politics.
Once ruled by secularists backed by powerful military generals, Turkey has seen the rise over the last decade of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials A.K.P., that was rooted in political Islam but also included other partners, including liberals and some on the nonreligious right.
Most of the liberals and the non-pious no longer support the A.K.P., and now that Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Gulen, who represent different Turkish Islamist traditions, are basically at war, the party is at risk of collapsing, said analysts.
In another setback for Mr. Erdogan, a prominent A.K.P. lawmaker who was a former interior minister resigned from the party on Wednesday – not because he was implicated in the corruption investigation but was disgusted by how the government was handling it, dismissing police officers and attacking the judiciary.
“It seems that within the A.K.P. things are spiraling out of control,” said Mr. Oktem, the research fellow at Oxford.
More broadly, the clash is also seen as a contest over the viability of political Islam, and comes after Islamist movements struggled to maintain power in post-revolution Egypt and Tunisia. “What we have seen in Egypt and Tunisia was a fight between Islamists and non-Islamists,” Mr. Oktem said. “What we are seeing in Turkey is between two Islamist movements.”
The question is whether the clash will upend the Turkish political system. “This kind of power struggle between two different Islamist groups might make the non-Islamist, secular groups, more powerful, in Turkey’s case,” Mr. Oktem said.
Mr. Erdogan’s assertions of a foreign plot, implying American and Israeli subterfuge, has angered the United States and damaged his once strong personal bond with President Obama. The State Department, in a statement issued Tuesday, said attacks in the pro-government Turkish media against American officials are, “deeply disturbing.”
Gerald Knaus, chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a policy research organization in Istanbul, said Mr. Erdogan now resembled De Gaulle, who restored postwar France to prosperity but misjudged the protests in 1968 that weakened him.
“When De Gaulle realized that he was out of touch, he resigned one year later and preserved what he had achieved, and his party,” Mr. Knaus said. “Perhaps this is the best option for Erdogan now.”

Mahmut Kaya contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Dan Bilefsky from Paris.