Secularists at bay

“A NEW Turkey” was the promise of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became its first elected president on August 10th. No sooner was he sworn in than Mr Erdogan said he would move out of Ataturk’s palace, in Ankara’s secular Cankaya district, into a new state-of-the-art complex on the edge of the city. Never mind that an Ankara court ruled in February that the site was environmentally protected. “If they [the court] have the power to demolish it [the new office], let them, I shall sit in it,” Mr Erdogan said.

Turkey’s secularists see this as more evidence that Mr Erdogan wants to replace Ataturk’s republic with Islamist rule. They cite changes in education. The number of imam hatip (Sunni Islamic clerical training) schools has doubled in five years, and pupils who fail the new exam to get into their first choice have been pushed into imam hatip schools instead. “The past three years have seen a marked shift towards greater Islamic influence over education,” says Batuhan Aydagul, an education analyst.

In Mr Erdogan’s Turkey, praying five times a day and observing Ramadan are pluses. Cabinet ministers eager to curry favour tweet verses from the Koran. Some suggest that Mr Erdogan’s obsession with piety has helped snuff out allegations of massive corruption levelled against him, his family, and political and business cronies by prosecutors said to be close to Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based imam. Dozens of policemen have been arrested and thousands of alleged Gulenists in the police and judiciary reshuffled or purged since the scandal broke last December.

On September 1st Istanbul’s chief prosecutor dropped bribery and graft charges against 96 suspects, including Mr Erdogan’s son Bilal. He said the officials investigating them had tried “to launch a coup”. Five policemen who spearheaded the probes were arrested on September 4th on similar charges. And 35 fans of Besiktas, an Istanbul football team, were indicted for trying to attract the foreign media to the Gezi protests so as to overthrow the government. Evidence against the fans, who face life imprisonment, includes paying for protesters’ meals.

On September 10th, Turkey’s parliament approved legislation to tighten the government’s control over the internet. The telecoms directorate will now be able to block websites for four hours without court authorisation. The bill also calls for a rezoning of Istanbul’s Atasehir and Umraniye districts, “clearing the way for more government corruption”, observes Aykan Erdemir, a secular opposition member of parliament.