With two weeks to go before a crucial parliamentary
election in Turkey, tensions are rising and some critics of President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan fear a new crackdown is starting to ensure that his
Justice and Development Party wins.
Mr.
Erdogan has a long history of intimidating and co-opting the Turkish
media, but new alarms were set off this week when criminal complaints
were filed against editors of the Hurriyet Daily News and its website
over a headline Mr. Erdogan had objected to.
Read more: Dark Clouds Over Turkey - NYTimes.com
That kind of brute manipulation of
the political process would be a serious mistake, further weakening the
country’s battered democracy and tainting whatever victory might emerge.
After
more than a decade of amassing power as Turkey’s leader, Mr. Erdogan
could be on the verge of realizing his dream of changing the
Constitution to make the president, rather than the prime minister, the
leading political authority. His party, known as A.K.P., would have to
win 330 seats in Parliament on June 7 — a three-fifths majority — to
take a proposed constitutional change to a referendum.
The party won only 326 seats in the last election in 2011, and on Friday Reuters reported that the most recent poll by the research firm Konda suggests that support for A.K.P. has declined.
Read more: Dark Clouds Over Turkey - NYTimes.com