Turkey - WHEN it comes to sex scandals, Turkey is in the top league. Over the past weeks a series of compromising videos posted online has forced the resignation of ten senior members of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP). Spy cameras placed in assorted boudoirs captured the men in the act; one allegedly with a 16-year-old girl. The videos’ distributors say the exposés will continue until they have forced out Devlet Bahceli, the MHP leader. The scandal could have an important effect on a parliamentary election on June 12th. Many MHP officials say the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party is behind the videos. AK, they say, aims to push the MHP under the threshold of 10% of the vote needed to win seats in parliament. (The MHP currently holds 70 out of 550.) This would give AK more seats and allow Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, to write a new constitution tailored to enhance his presidential ambitions. In the run-up to the vote Mr Erdogan has been unabashedly pandering to the nationalists. He is increasingly rude about the European Union and has gone so far as to declare that Turkey no longer has a Kurdish problem. Even more controversially, he has taken to attacking Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main pro-secular opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), for being an Alevi, a liberal branch of Shia Islam with 20m adherents in Turkey—with the subtext that he is not “a real Muslim”. In Turkey Sunni Islam and nationalism have long gone hand in hand. Full Story>>
