Turkey's Byzantine Scandal

Corruption charges threaten the country's Islamist leader.

Dec. 26, 2013 3:07 p.m. ET

 The Wall Street Journal

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent the past week blaming a burgeoning corruption scandal on foreign plotters. But Wednesday's trio of resignations from his cabinet, which were intended to insulate Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister, had the effect of bringing the scandal to his doorstep.

The Interior and Economy Ministers did their duty by denouncing the investigations and professing the prime minister's (and their own) innocence. But Erdogan Bayraktar, the Minister for the Environment and a confidant of the PM, went out with a bang. Mr. Bayraktar said Wednesday that he was pressured to resign to shield Mr. Erdogan from the scandal, which concerns alleged payoffs to facilitate real-estate development deals. He also suggested that if it was right for him to step aside for the country's sake, then Mr. Erdogan should resign as well.

In addition to blaming the crackdown on unnamed foreign governments, Mr. Erdogan has spent the week tightening his control over police and prosecutors. Scores of police chiefs around Turkey have been fired and replaced since the investigation went public December 17 with some two dozen arrests. Prosecutors have been barred from conducting investigations without informing their political masters first.

The Prime Minister has spent a decade consolidating power in Turkey, and his AK Party faces no serious rival on the national stage. The Turkish military, once feared by civilian governments, has been removed from the political scene. Mr. Erdogan's deceitful and brutal handling last summer of protesters in Istanbul damaged his international reputation, but the protests did not seem to shake his political grip.

Last week's arrests, however, show that Mr. Erdogan's political dominance has limits. Turkish politics over the past decade has been steeped in corruption, conspiracy and counter-conspiracy allegations, along with mass arrests and show trials of the old secularist establishment. This once served Mr. Erdogan's political ends, but now he may be losing his control over the broader Islamist movement he once led.

That's a good thing. Free societies need checks and balances to remain free, and the rule of law requires political independence by the judiciary, prosecutors and the police. It isn't clear whether the current crisis is anything more than a power struggle between competing factions within Turkey's notorious deep state. But it also shows that Mr. Erdogan and the AKP are not politically invulnerable, and that a more vigorous opposition could still rescue the country's democracy from one-party rule.

Mr. Erdogan may win this round of political infighting, to judge by reports that newly installed police chiefs are more reluctant than their predecessors to pursue investigation. But if the charges of corruption and self-enrichment among AKP members and their families prove true, they will haunt Mr. Erdogan for as long as he remains in power—and shorten the time he remains there.