Evidence of electronic eavesdropping on a political party just over a week before an election has given opposition leaders ammunition to question the state of Turkey’s democracy under Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan. Controversy flared around Erdogan after he said earlier this week that opposition parties were ganging up to stop his AK party winning more seats in the Kurdish southeast, and that a recording would be released to prove it.
“I think the voice recordings will be published today or tomorrow,” Erdogan said in a televised campaign speech in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir on Wednesday.
The recordings were released on Thursday. The frank admission of foreknowledge stunned some political commentators in a country where many people avoid talking on the telephone about politics for fear that someone is listening in. “I was frozen for a moment when I heard him say this on television,” Murat Yetkin wrote in Radikal newspaper on Friday.
“The prime minister was announcing a recording of a conversation between two members of another political party and was saying it would be released on the internet soon,” Yetkin said in a column that drew parallels with the Watergate scandal that brought down US President Richard Nixon in 1974.
