An analysis published Sunday in Turkey’s Today’s Zaman accuses the ruling Freedom and Justice Party (AKP) of consolidating its monopoly over Turkey’s government institutions in a similar fashion to how the clerics took control of Iran’s government following the the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah.

An Istanbul-based political commentator, Ömer Yavuz, argues:

In a nutshell, Iran’s clerical leaders hijacked the Iranian people’s revolution against the authoritarian rule of the shah and created yet another authoritarian regime of their own. Similarly, the Pasdaran has exploited both the popular sympathy for its sacrifices during the Iran-Iraq war, and the resources available to it as the vanguard of the regime, in order to enrich regime loyalists at the expense of the rest of the population.
What the AKP has been doing in Turkey is no different. To see the similarity, it would be enough to simply replace the supreme leader or Khomeini, in the account above, with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Pasdaran with the AKP as a whole, the Ghorb with the Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKİ), the foundation with the Foundation of Youth and Education in Turkey (TÜRGEV) and other AKP-backed foundations and NGOs.

Reacting to the AKP’s recent power grabs Yavuz concludes:

In the final analysis, it is clear that through the AKP the Turkish Republic is deliberately and consistently being “Iranized.” What has happened so far is indicative of what is to come. Whether or not the AKP leaders are transforming the country in order to escape justice, or because their hearts are with Iran’s Islamic revolution, is only a secondary issue. As a matter of fact, Efkan Ala, the AKP’s interior minister, already admitted publicly back in September during his address at the Ankara Chamber of Industrialists, saying, “We have one thing to do: changing the state’s structure, transforming and rendering it suitable to us, rendering it suitable to [the] people.”

[Photo: Meet the Real Iran / YouTube ]