GOVERNMENTS fall in Turkey either because they are massively corrupt or because generals boot them out (or both). In 2002, fed up with the greed and ineptitude of the country’s secular parties, voters chose Recep Tayyip Erdogan as prime minister as they propelled his mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) Party into government. A decade on, AK, which means “white” or “pure” in Turkish, has proven not to be so exceptional after all and finds itself mired in one of the biggest graft scandals in recent history.On December 17th the police arrested around 50 people on suspicion of tender rigging, covert gold transfers to Iran and bribery. They included the sons of three cabinet ministers, an AK mayor, and the general manager of Turkey’s second biggest state lender, Halkbank, in whose home police found $ 4.5m crammed into shoeboxes. The probe drew closer to Mr Erdogan when prosecutors ordered a second raid that would have netted his son, who is alleged to have enriched himself through shady property deals. Mr Erdogan responded by reassigning hundreds of police chiefs, sacking a prosecutor involved in the investigation and rewriting laws in ways that would allow the…
