The de facto ruling coalition between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Fethullah Gulen community has devolved into a war, which is now in the open. The Gulen community was instrumental in ending the political tutelage of Turkey’s Kemalist-Republican military and senior judicial bureaucracy through a series of police operations and mass trials from 2008 to 2011, as well as administrative and constitutional measures. The row, which flared occasionally in the past two years, has grown into an open war, with the sides hurling veiled threats at each other, after it emerged that the government is planning to shut down Turkey’s prep schools, a major source of financial revenues and human resources for the Gulen community.
The spark that fueled the war was a scoop that the Zaman daily, the flagship of the Gulenist media, published coverage on Nov. 13 about a draft law indicating that the AKP is readying to close down the prep schools in the 2013-14 school year.