A dogfight shaping up at the highest levels of the Turkish government could shake the entire country.

The state prosecutor has applied to the Constitutional Court to ban the ruling party as a religious party intent on introducing Islamic customs and law, contrary to the nation's secularist foundation.  The ban would include the party leader and democratically elected prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

With Turkey's Constitutional Court due to rule on whether to ban the ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development (AK) party, the country's political fault lines are growing deeper.

They pit the AK against Turkey's decades-old secular establishment, which includes the military and parts of the judiciary. Each side accuses the other of operating a "deep state," or shadow government activities. The secularists accuse the AK party of quietly seeking to overhaul Turkey's secular order, while the ruling party says the secular establishment will do anything to maintain that order — even a coup d'etat or murder.

The crisis deepened when a dozen people accused of being members of the establishment's "deep state" were arrested on March 21, including 83-year-old Ilhan Selcuk, a well-known secularist journalist of the "Cumhuriyet" newspaper and a fierce government opponent, as well as Kemal Alemdaroglu, a former president of Istanbul University.

The arrests are widely seen as the AK party’s response to the crisis, but officials maintain they are unrelated.

The court will decide “soon” whether to consider the prosecutor’s argument.

Some business leaders and other observers fear that an all-out fight between the ruling party and its secularist adversaries could prompt a military coup.

Previous related posts: