Get out of my way!

‘Don’t be rude, and get out of my way!’, Recep Tayyip Erdogan shouted at a group of photojournalists. The Prime Minister is not at his best these days. Not surprisingly, because one crisis has hardly ended (like the closure case against his AKP party, which turned out positively for him), when another crisis begins: the AKP is deeply entangled in a scandal centred around the German charity foundation Deniz Feneri (which I wrote about before). One revelation follows another, now even from the ranks of the party itself: a former AKP politician, who was expelled from the party because of fraud allegations, says that the AKP has been involved in shady transactions with Deniz Feneri from the very beginning. Of course it’s making headlines in the papers, and Erdogan is not getting any nicer. A few days ago he insulted Deniz Baykal, leader of opposition party CHP. The CHP is boisterously on the attack over the Deniz Feneri case, and Erdogan said, in a reference to Baykal, that someone making allegations without proof is being şerefsiz. Now şerefsiz means ‘honourless’, and believe me, that’s not something you should say, especially not on the highest political level. Now the speculation is that the Prime Minister is not only stressed, but also in poor health physically. Two years ago, he fainted during Ramadan, and newspapers don’t hesitate to remind their readers of that. If Erdogan was not a mature man capable of deciding to focus on the reforms that Turkey needs, instead of thrashing about aimlessly, one could almost feel sorry for him.