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How Erdogan’s Troubles Are Good for Turkey

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Translation does not do proper service to Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, the full name of the party headed by Turkey’s besieged Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In English, it comes out as “Justice and Development Party.” But in the country it has dominated for more than a decade, the party is known by its all-important initials, AK, two letters that form a word understood as “white,” “pure,” “clean” or, best of all, “unblemished.” Those qualities constituted the fundamental appeal of the newly-minted party at the moment of its creation, in 2001: More than it ever was “Islamist,” AK Parti (AKP) was a populist effort in a Muslim country where staunchly secular parties just one year earlier had driven the economy deep into the ground, with the gross national product falling into negative territory and the country’s currency, the lira, losing a third of its value. What AKP promised was reform. Religious piety, too, but chiefly as the quality that informed the character of its leadership — just as it did the surging Anatolian business establishment that lined up behind it, and the heartland Turk to which it made its appeal. “Are you ready to bring an AK Parti government with your votes as white as your mothers’ milk?” Erdogan asked in his stump speech, the same one that railed against “those who emptied the banks.” The crowd of textile workers and shopkeepers roared their approval, as it has in every election since. “Everybody’s religious belief is something personal,” a laborer named Nevzer Birtekin told me after the Istanbul rally. “But he’s honest. That’s what determines it for me.” Today, having overseen the expansion of a Turkish economy that’s triple the size of what it was when he took office, Erdogan staggers under the weight of a corruption scandal that rises directly from the extraordinary success of his no-longer unblemished party: As the most dominant player in Turkish politics, the AKP grew only more powerful and cozy with its business backers. On Dec. 18, police reported finding $4.5 million in shoe

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