By the Editorial Team of TLF
The alarm is no longer coming only from Erdoğan’s opponents. A Yeni Şafak columnist warns that Turkey’s widening fund scandal could produce a “very major political rupture” — and, if public distrust is allowed to deepen, even open the door for an outsider to take power.
There is something unusual happening in Turkey’s pro-government press.
The scandal surrounding investment funds, spectacular returns, alleged market manipulation and questions over who knew what — and when — is beginning to move beyond the financial pages.
It is becoming a story about power.
And now one of the sharpest warnings is coming from a newspaper firmly associated with the Erdoğan era.
Yeni Şafak columnist Ersin Çelik does not attack President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Quite the opposite. He begins from the premise that Turkey, under Erdoğan, is making important moves abroad at an exceptionally dangerous moment: wars surround the country, states are positioning themselves for a changing world order, and Ankara is pursuing an ambitious foreign, diplomatic and defence policy.
Then he turns the argument inward.
What happens, Çelik asks in effect, if all of that is undermined at home?
What happens if people who are close to the government — or simply appear to be close to it — are seen to have enriched themselves from the savings of ordinary citizens?
And what happens if nobody can convincingly explain who benefited, who protected whom and why the system failed to stop it?
For Çelik, the answer is not simply another bad week for Borsa Istanbul.
It could become a political rupture.
“If someone, by being close to the government or appearing close to it, seizes the savings of the people,” he wrote, and there is no convincing accountability, no remedy for the victims, no restoration of order in the markets and no reconsideration of those entrusted with public office, there could be a “very major political rupture.”
Then comes the line that gives his column a significance well beyond the fund scandal itself.
Çelik worries that accumulated distrust could, as he puts it, “pave the way for someone from outside politics to become the head of the country.”
His example is Ukraine.
The Zelenskyy Scenario
The comparison is provocative, but Çelik’s argument is more specific than suggesting that Turkey is somehow becoming Ukraine.
He points to the political environment that preceded Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rise: anger with the established political class, repeated corruption controversies and a public increasingly willing to look beyond conventional politicians.
Zelenskyy, an actor and television personality with no previous elected office, won Ukraine’s presidency in 2019.
Çelik fears that something similar could eventually happen in Turkey if distrust continues to accumulate.
That does not amount to a prediction that Erdoğan is about to lose power. Nor does Çelik identify a Turkish figure who could play the role of an outsider challenger.
But his choice of analogy matters.
The danger he is describing is not simply voters moving from Erdoğan’s governing camp to one of Turkey’s established opposition parties.
It is something potentially more disruptive: voters losing confidence in the political establishment itself.
In that sense, Çelik is raising a question that would have sounded extraordinary in the pages of the pro-government press only a short time ago.
Could a financial scandal help create the conditions for the end of the Erdoğan political era?
Follow the Money — and the Protection
Çelik is not the only Yeni Şafak writer asking uncomfortable questions.
His colleague Aydın Ünal had already turned his attention to perhaps the most politically sensitive part of the affair: whether anybody was protected.
Who supervised the funds? Who entered at the right moment? Who walked away with extraordinary profits? Did anyone receive information unavailable to ordinary investors? And, above all, were there people whom the authorities protected?
These questions matter because financial scandals rarely become politically dangerous simply because money has been lost.
They become dangerous when people begin to believe that there were two sets of rules: one for ordinary investors and another for insiders.
That distinction sits at the heart of the political warning now emerging from Yeni Şafak.
If hundreds of thousands of people see their investments frozen, diminished or thrown into uncertainty while others appear to have escaped at precisely the right moment, the question quickly changes from “What happened to these funds?” to “Who knew?”
And then to the most damaging question of all:
“Who protected them?”
The Crisis TLF Has Been Following
The Levant Files has already examined the financial side of this story in “Borsa Istanbul’s Fund Crisis: Five Questions Behind Turkey’s Market Turmoil.”
https://www.thelevantfiles.org/2026/09/borsa-istanbuls-fund-crisis-five.html
Since then, the affair has continued to widen.
Yeni Şafak reported on 24 September that five executives connected with Tera and Pusula had been arrested. Prosecutors, according to the newspaper, are examining alleged aggravated fraud and market manipulation as well as conduct they believe may have taken place within an organised structure.
Those are allegations. The judicial process has not established the guilt of those involved.
The scale of the wider fund crisis, however, is already substantial. Reuters reported that Turkish regulators ordered the liquidation of 131 funds managed by seven asset managers, involving approximately 353,000 investors and assets worth more than $18 billion.
For the government, that creates a problem that cannot necessarily be solved by stabilising share prices.
The deeper problem is confidence.
Erdoğan’s More Dangerous Front?
Erdoğan has survived political crises, elections, economic shocks, mass protests, a coup attempt and years of confrontation with domestic and foreign opponents.
That history is precisely why the warning now appearing in Yeni Şafak deserves attention.
Çelik is not arguing that Erdoğan’s opponents are about to defeat him.
He is warning about something less visible: the possibility that people who claim proximity to power could corrode the political system from within.
His argument is essentially that foreign-policy successes, defence achievements and geopolitical ambition may count for little with a citizen who believes his savings disappeared while somebody with the right connections became rich.
And once that belief takes hold, the damage may be difficult to contain.
For now, there is no evidence that Turkey is on the verge of the political upheaval Çelik fears. His Ukraine comparison is a warning, not a forecast.
But something has changed when such a warning appears in Yeni Şafak.
The question surrounding Turkey’s fund scandal is therefore no longer only how much money was lost, which funds will disappear or who prosecutors will investigate next.
It is whether the scandal will be contained as a financial and judicial affair — or whether it will leave behind something much harder for Erdoğan and his government to repair: The belief that proximity to power matters more than the rules.
Photo: AI
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