In the last few weeks, Turkey has been in a constant condition of tension.
In mid-July, a spectacular prosecution began against 86 highly placed people who stood accused of being included in an ultra-nationalist network called Ergenekon. Two weeks later, a bomb exploded on a pedestrian street in Istanbul and killed 17 people.
At the same time, the final negotiations took place in the constitutional case that Carl Bildt has called a "coup d'etat disguised as law. "The country's constitutional court was determining whether the governing party AKP should be closed down because it threatened Turkey's secular order. On Aug. 1 came the somewhat surprising decision that the party was warned, but not banned. It is a good sign that the constitutional court did not ban the AKP. But the attempt to remove a democratically elected government shows that Turkey is still caught up in a political-abuse logic that goes back decades.
- Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sweden
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