The Turkish prime minister is intervening to the institution that will examine the audio document.
Thousands of Turkish citizens took to the streets of Istanbul and headed towards Taksim Square in order to demonstrate against Recep Tayyip Erdogan a few hours after the revelation of the wiretap conversation, in which he was giving instructions to his son to remove the €30 million he was keeping in his residence.
In the demonstration that was organized by the mayor candidate of the Republican People’s party, Mustafa Sarigul, the demonstrators were shouting slogans like “Erdogan thief”, “walk away”. The people responsible for organizing the demonstration distributed fake paper money, almost as much as the Turkish prime minister was hiding in his residence, as symbols of the corruption in the government.
Erdogan attempted to make his own finding
Everybody in Turkey are wondering if the sound document is real or a fake as the Turkish prime minister claims. The minister of technology and science, Fikri Işık, stated that the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (TUBITAK) will examine the sound document and decide on its validity.
A few hours later there was a government intervention and five of the institution’s members were removed. The main opposition claims that Erdogan is trying to set the investigators himself, in order to come up with a verdict that will speak of a montaged document.
The leader of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy political party, Selahattin Demirtaş , called the prime minister to visit TUBITAK and prove that the voice that can be heard on the recording is not his own. Erdogan however has not denied that the sound that can be heard is that of his own voice, but that the whole document is a product of montage.
The sound document breaks all records
Erdogan’s telephone conversation, which is a product of wiretapping, is breaking every hit record in youtube. Within 24 hours, 2.5 million people have listened to the dialogue between the Turkish prime minister and his son, while every hour tens of thousands of Turkish people listen in amazement to their prime minister’s attempt to hide the evidence.
In Turkey however there are rumors that in the next few days there is the possibility that new documents will see the light of day, which will further incriminate Erdogan. What everyone is suspecting is that there might exist a video that shows Bilal Erdogan moving the suitcases with the money.
“Erdogan’s expiration date has come”.
The talk in Turkey refers to the post-Erdogan era that has already began. “Since the time of the Gezi demonstrations we had said that the prime minister’s expiration date has come. He cannot start something new, something fresh. He doesn’t have the stamina. The Erdogan era has come to an end; the only thing we do not know is when and how the end of this era will come”, writes characteristically the political analyst, Cengiz Çandar, in the newspaper Hürriyet.
The paper money movement
There is a new movement in Turkey, which calls the Turkish people to write the phrase “there is a thief” on the lira bills. The movement started through the internet and thousands of Turks write these two words on the turkish lira aiming “to remind the Turkish people that Erdogan is a thief”, those who started the attempt state.