The paranoid style flourishes in Turkish politics. Towards the end of May, the Republican People’s party (CHP), the biggest opposition group in parliament, claimed that the office of Onder Sav, the party’s secretary-general, had been bugged, after the transcript of a private conversation between him and a guest appeared in an Islamist newspaper.
The incident, which has since appeared to involve a wayward mobile telephone rather than anything more sinister, was a reminder of similar cases from the past, and an illustration of the remorselessness of Turkish politics. It reveals the ways in which Turkey’s warring institutions distrust each other.
