<strong>The long read</strong>: Despite vows to tighten the rules after the 1999 quake, cronyism and complacency have undermined Turkey’s governance – at the cost of many thousands of lives
One way of reading the AKP’s progress is as a two-step process of privatization. In its first two terms, the AKP government privatized a large portion of Turkey’s state assets; since then, it has moved to make the state itself the private property of one man and his friends. The first phase standard neoliberalism won the AKP applause from the Western establishment, which is now aghast at the second phase, which looks more like Putin than Thatcher.
Taking a handful of men into custody does not constitute an acknowledgment of the party-state’s systemic refusal to enforce public safety requirements when its clientelist political economy was at stake. As a Turkish colleague put it to me in conversation, the culprits will not be held to account when the culprits and those holding to account are the same people.