Justice and Development Party

So about almost half a million investors have been infected.

And you kind of see one of the senior leaders of Erdogan's AKP party resign, the head of family affairs.

It's just a huge, huge scandal that's kind of rocking the country.

And parliament opened in Turkey yesterday.

Number two was the rise of the Islamic State.

You'll recall, Larry, that we had lots of debates in the 90s and early 2000s about Islamism and democracy and could the Muslim Brotherhood be a democratic force and what did it mean to be a Muslim democracy? People looked at Turkey and the AK Party and well, you know, you can see what Erdogan is doing now.

And there was a lot of skepticism.

And in my book in 2008, I had a chapter called, I don't remember the title of the chapter, but it was about this question of Islamism and democracy.

Yeah, I would personally argue that Turkey went through quite many changes.

The Turkish foreign policy changed with the Erdogan government, the AKP government quite strongly.

But initially, it was more like a romantic approach towards the Middle East because Turkey The Kemalist doctrine of Turkey had foreseen just to ignore what happens in the Arab world and to not meddle into the affairs of the Arabs and to stay out of it.

So the Turkish security architecture was always trying to stay away from the Middle East.

And you say that because basically Brussels was giving no clear accession perspective, Turkey's rulers had little incentive to comply with the democratic conditionality pushed by Brussels.

Yet democratization also went into reverse because Erdogan and the AKP grabbed power of their own accord.

So there's plenty of blame to go around.

There's obviously the Cyprus question, which is another key factor there.

And there are allegations that it's a big Ponzi scheme.

The deputy head of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, the AKP, is implicated in the scandal.

And indeed, she has resigned.

There are allegations that her husband and herself were involved in Taking advantage of investor monies and reaping just billions in profits, in weird profits.

There's a whole bunch of other companies that have been affiliated with this scandal.

The charges that they are talking about include money laundering and other crimes that they're looking to charge people with.

They're also freezing the assets of some people, including the deputy head of the Justice and Development Party.

Her name is Fatima Betul Sayankaya, and she has resigned from her post.

It's hard to keep up.

In this latest case, he faces more time in prison and a ban from politics, thanks to a defamation case brought by a former mayor from President Tayyip Erdogan's ruling AK Party.

For the last two years, I've been facing not only my political rivals, but successive cases and judicial processes, Imamoglu told the court in his defence statement.

He noted this was all happening after he'd won four local elections against the government party candidates and become the main opposition party's candidate for future presidential elections.

They banned our events, then they started banning any kind of event, including the concerts.

So we are on the verge of a new era, a new authoritarian era that AKP is trying to just construct, trying to have a society according to their vision, which is a militaristic vision on the one hand, like very conservative vision and also they want a very docile society and I think this was the first step of it and if we cannot put a stop to that it will continue and we will enter a new dark era because the last dark era we entered was after 2015 like there were a lot of like bad things happened like attempted military coup state of emergency bomb attacks etc and it all began with an attack To Istanbul Pride March, I was there in 2015.

I was detained.

I was reporting from the field.

After this operation, the Minister of Justice, Akın Gürlek, declared that there will be a new election in one and a half years.

It will be like an early election and President Erdoğan will again be a candidate.

So we can easily say that this operation was the starting point of AKP's election campaign.

This is a very recent one.

Yeah.

Right? Uh, and, uh, the AK Party, the Justice and Development Party of, uh, Recep Erdoğan, uh, is bre- is basically an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mm-hmm.

So UAE has taken a doctrinal position towards Muslim Brotherhood.