Since the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power over a decade ago, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has relentlessly argued that single-party government is what this country needs to assure political stability and economic welfare. This approach has been more or less accepted as a reference to a February 2001 incident where then-President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, at a National Security Council meeting, threw the booklet of the constitution in the face of Bulent Ecevit, the head of the coalition government. That incident caused severe economic turbulence and led Turks to oust the mainstream political parties from powerhouse positions while giving the Erdogan government — which was new and untested — a chance to prove itself. Time, however, has shown that the threat to Turkey's economic and political stability is not one-party or multiparty government — or the secular or Islamist camp — but rather a weak democratic system characterized by the absence of true checks and balances.

The latest example that makes this point appeared in the headlines on the morning of Feb. 24 in the pro-government dailies Star and Yeni Safak. Since the corruption and bribery investigation became public in December, putting the Erdogan government under criminal scrutiny, Erdogan has been accusing the US-based Sunni religious leader Fethullah Gulen’s followers of hijacking the state’s key institutions, such as the judiciary and the security establishment, and forming a “parallel state” that aims to carry out a “coup” to bring down his government. Since the graft probe surfaced, the AKP government has reassigned hundreds of prosecutors and judges, and thousands of police officers, in a move unmatched in Turkey's history.

The two pro-government dailies claim that the new prosecutors assigned to the Istanbul Public Prosecutor’s Office have discovered files that show thousands of people have been wiretapped for three years under suspicion of being members of a terrorist organization named Selam (in English, Hello Terror Organization). Yeni Safak said 3,064 people had been under surveillance; Star said the number was around 7,000. Erdogan is listed among those wiretapped, along with his close inner circle, including his national intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, his political adviser Yalcin Akdogan, his former adviser and current Interior Minister Efkan Ala and many well-known journalists, academics, businessmen and representatives of nongovernmental organizations. Turkish media speculated during the day that the total number of people wiretapped in the country exceeds 300,000.

Taner Yildiz, the minister of Energy and Natural Resources, was the first to comment this morning on the story on behalf of the government. “Who are the people that make [up] this Selam? What have they done? What is their goal? There can be no such frivolousness like this,” he said. “We have ongoing consultations with our neighbors in the Middle East, with Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, as well as the European Union and the United States. If their intent is to question the content of these consultations, I consider this to be wrong and a big insult to the Republic of Turkey and its government. This could bring us to the following conclusion: The people who did the wiretapping consider themselves to be the owners of the real state, and treat us as the parallel entity. According to them, we are the parallel state. No such thing can be accepted.”