Turkey’s travails: purges worsen Ankara’s democracy deficit
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan holds Fethullah Gulen, the self-exiled conservative leader of Hizmet, one of the world’s biggest Islamic movements, responsible for the attempt to overthrow his democratically elected government. Erdogan asserts that Gulen’s followers infiltrated the military, police, judiciary, bureaucracy, and education system as well as the media. In response, he has arrested tens of thousands and fired a similar number of military and police officers, judiciary personnel, teachers and professors, and bureaucrats accused of being Gulen sympathisers.