The reconciliation of rival underworld groups, signals about Sedat Peker’s return and changes inside Turkey’s security bureaucracy raise a larger question: Is Turkey quietly reorganizing its informal centers of power?
Something unusual is happening around Turkey’s nationalist-security establishment.
Taken separately, almost every recent development has a conventional explanation. Two rival groups end a decades-long feud. A political leader mediates. Sedat Peker welcomes the reconciliation. A senior MHP politician speaks positively about Peker’s possible return. Meanwhile, responsibilities inside Turkey’s police command are redistributed.
Put these events on the same timeline, however, and a larger question emerges:
Are Turkey’s political, security and informal power networks being repositioned?
And if so, is this happening for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, against him or in preparation for a political future after him?
From an Alleged Assassination Plot to MHP Headquarters
The chronology is striking.
On September 10, Turkish authorities announced the arrest of 19 suspects accused of preparing an armed attack against Sedat Şahin on behalf of a figure authorities associated with the Sarallar organization. Authorities said weapons seized in the investigation included a rocket launcher, anti-tank rockets, Kalashnikov rifles and MP5 submachine guns.
Barely two weeks later, the picture had changed dramatically.
Sedat Şahin and Burhanettin Saral appeared together at MHP headquarters with party leader Devlet Bahçeli. The MHP publicly celebrated the meeting as a reconciliation between two families whose conflict had continued for more than two decades.
The location is politically significant.
The reconciliation did not occur privately. It took place at the headquarters of one of the parties governing Turkey through the Cumhur Alliance.
There is no evidence that the meeting itself constituted an illegal arrangement. Ending a violent feud is, in itself, hardly objectionable.
But it raises a political question:
Why has the MHP become the mediator between actors long associated in Turkish public reporting with the underworld?
Then Came Sedat Peker
Sedat Peker publicly welcomed the reconciliation and thanked Bahçeli and those involved in bringing the sides together.
Then came an even more interesting statement.
MHP Deputy Chairman İsmail Özdemir said Peker was regarded by Bahçeli as a fellow nationalist and expressed the expectation that Peker and his family would soon return to Turkey. No official return arrangement or date was announced.
That represents a remarkable change in political atmosphere.
Peker spent years abroad publishing allegations involving politicians, businessmen and figures from Turkey’s security establishment. Now, instead of being treated solely as an outsider challenging the system, his possible return is being discussed publicly by a senior figure in Erdoğan’s coalition partner.
The question therefore is not simply whether Peker will return.
It is:
If he returns, into what political arrangement will he return?
Meanwhile, Something Changed Inside the Police
During the same period, another development occurred.
Responsibilities at Turkey’s General Directorate of Security were redistributed. Counter-Smuggling and Organized Crime, Narcotics, Counterterrorism and Special Operations were placed under Deputy Police Chief Mustafa Çalışkan.
There is currently no public evidence establishing that this bureaucratic decision was connected to the Saral-Şahin reconciliation or to Peker.
That distinction is important.
Nevertheless, the concentration of these particular departments is noteworthy. They sit precisely at the intersection of organized crime, political violence, terrorism and the state’s coercive capabilities.
Once again, the question is not whether the events prove coordination.
They do not.
The question is why so many pieces of Turkey’s nationalist-security landscape appear to be moving at approximately the same moment.
Is This Ergenekon?
The temptation is to call this the return of the “deep state”—or even Ergenekon.
That conclusion goes beyond the available evidence.
There is no public evidence demonstrating that an organization called Ergenekon is bringing mafia groups, nationalist politicians and security officials together to create a new armed structure.
But Turkey’s history explains why the question arises.
The 1996 Susurluk scandal exposed documented relationships involving state officials, security personnel and organized-crime figures. The later Ergenekon prosecutions alleged another clandestine network, although those cases became deeply controversial and many convictions were eventually overturned.
The relevant historical lesson is therefore not that “Ergenekon has returned.”
It is that Turkey has repeatedly experienced periods in which the boundary separating formal state authority from informal coercive power became difficult to see.
That makes the present developments worth examining.
Bahçeli Is the Central Figure
The most interesting person in this story may not be Peker.
It may be Devlet Bahçeli.
Bahçeli remains Erdoğan’s principal nationalist ally. Yet his political role increasingly extends beyond conventional party politics.
He helped initiate the extraordinary new political opening involving Abdullah Öcalan. Now he has personally mediated between two rival groups associated in public reporting with Turkey’s underworld. At the same time, senior MHP officials are publicly signaling a possible return for Peker.
These developments can be interpreted in several ways.
The simplest is that Bahçeli is helping Erdoğan stabilize the system.
Under this interpretation, reconciliation between rival groups reduces uncontrolled violence. Bringing Peker back into a predictable legal and political environment could reduce another source of uncertainty. Changes within the police could similarly reflect an effort to strengthen state control.
In that scenario, this is not a structure against Erdoğan.
It is part of the architecture supporting his government.
But there is another possibility.
Supporting Erdoğan Today, Preparing for Tomorrow
Political alliances do not have to be conspiracies.
The MHP can support Erdoğan while simultaneously building its own institutional influence.
Those objectives are not contradictory.
Erdoğan has dominated Turkish politics for more than two decades. Eventually, every political system organized around one dominant leader confronts a question of institutional continuity.
What survives when that leader is no longer at the center?
For Turkey’s nationalist establishment, that question matters enormously.
Who maintains influence inside the security bureaucracy?
Who can mediate between rival nationalist groups?
Who communicates with powerful informal actors?
Who prevents competing networks from turning their weapons against one another during political uncertainty?
And who becomes the broker when the existing balance of power begins to change?
Seen from this perspective, the Sarallar-Şahinler reconciliation looks different.
Perhaps the objective is not to mobilize these groups.
Perhaps it is to pacify and control them.
The same could be true of Peker.
A Peker attacking the political establishment from abroad is an unpredictable actor. A Peker returning through some future legal and political arrangement would operate in a very different environment.
Mafia Peace—or a New Power Architecture?
None of this proves the existence of a conspiracy.
There is no evidence currently showing that Sarallar, Şahinler, Sedat Peker, Mustafa Çalışkan and the MHP belong to one coordinated structure.
But dismissing the entire sequence as coincidence would also avoid the larger political question.
Within weeks, Turkey witnessed an alleged heavily armed plot involving rival underworld groups, their subsequent reconciliation under Bahçeli’s political roof, Peker’s public support for that reconciliation, an MHP official openly discussing his possible return, and a redistribution of responsibility over some of the country’s most sensitive police departments.
These developments may have separate explanations.
But collectively they suggest that Turkey’s informal and formal centers of power are moving.
The crucial question, therefore, may not be whether Ergenekon is returning.
Nor even whether a new “deep state” is being created.
It is something more fundamental:
Who is reorganizing the relationship between the state, the nationalist movement, the security bureaucracy and Turkey’s underworld—and why now?
For the moment, there is no evidence demonstrating that this emerging alignment is directed against Erdoğan.
It may actually strengthen his political order.
But the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
A structure can support Erdoğan today and prepare to survive Erdoğan tomorrow.
And that may be the most consequential question behind Turkey’s latest mafia realignment:
Is this being built for Erdoğan—or for the Turkey that eventually comes after him?
