After the evening of Feb. 24, Turkey will never be the same. Around 9:00 p.m., recordings of five telephone conversations appeared on YouTube alleged to be between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his son, Bilal Erdogan. The conversations are said to have taken place Dec. 17 and 18. Was this the anticipated big bang expected to change the course of political developments in Turkey? Is there more to come?

We will have a wait a bit longer for the answer, but what is beyond question is that this is the most serious and damaging blow to Erdogan since the government corruption investigations became public in December. Whether it is a lethal blow remains to be seen. It might, however, have inflicted a fatal wound to the man who until recently was a larger-than-life Turkish political leader and an international statesman whose grip on power was presumably secure and would remain so for years to come, perhaps until the centennial of the Republic of Turkey, in 2023. Not anymore.

Erdogan's credibility, already shaken by the graft probe, has reached such a low point that his chances of survival are increasinly slim. No one is certain whether he will survive politically through 2014. Even if he does, he will not be the formidable and uncontested leader that he was until just recently.

In the alleged tapes of the Erdogan’s telephone conversations, it sounds as though the prime minister has asked his son to remove $1 billion from the homes of family members and conceal it. When news of the recordings broke, the senior leaders in the opposition parties — the center-left Republican Peoples Party (CHP) and nationalist-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) — held emergency meetings and declared the end of the legitimacy of Erdogan and his government.