Erdogan’s top lieutenant questions Turkey’s fight on illegal gambling 

Turkish authorities praised progress on campaigns and initiatives to tackle social harms and improve public health at the annual meeting of the High Council for Combatting Addiction. 

Chaired by Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz at the Presidential Complex, authorities detailed progress in implementing 88 of 91 directives proposed in 2019 by the Ministry of the Interior and public health organisation YEŞİLAY (Green Crescent).

The session highlighted Turkey’s strengthened multi-institutional efforts across a broad range of addiction-related challenges to map drug prevention, smoking cessation, alcohol control, and digital safety. 

Ministries presented data-backed updates on ongoing work: expanded rehabilitation facilities, increased cessation clinics, educational programmes in schools, and reinforced customs surveillance to combat narcotics smuggling.

For a government that has been grappling with economic strain and political unrest, the High Council offered a moment of policy coherence. 

The Erdogan administration has been focused on addiction prevention for some time, and the issue has received structured, multi-agency attention. 

Under Yılmaz’s stewardship, ministries have aligned prevention, enforcement, and education efforts with an eye toward long-term social stability. 

But beneath the polished progress report lay a conspicuous omission: virtual gambling (“sanal bahis”), a fast-expanding sector that the government has done little to contain. 

Yılmaz, who is viewed as President Erdoğan’s strict taskmaster  having overseen policing, addiction programs, economic reform agendas, and development planning. He conceded that the government has no meaningful picture of gambling addiction in Turkey, despite its growing social and economic toll.

The reason for this blind spot is political as much as institutional. Illicit online gambling thrives in the gaps between financial technology, enforcement apathy, and political convenience. While law enforcement has made strides in dismantling drug networks, gambling remains a topic few in Ankara are willing to broach with urgency. 

The AK government has called on federal police and intelligence agencies to draw up a national action plan. But few believe such a plan will reach the top of the government’s priority list. The issue, long aired by Ali Babacan, a former AK Party minister turned opposition leader, implicates individuals and networks with ties to Erdoğan’s inner circle. 

Doubts persist about whether the ruling party has the political appetite to pursue a crackdown that might expose uncomfortable affiliations — or worse, unseat sources of informal revenue.

The unease deepened with the recent arrest of Ahmed Faruk Karslı, CEO of Istanbul-based fintech app Papara in May – a business once regarded as “Turkey’s Fintech Unicorn”.

Karslı was detained by Police Intelligence on charges of corruption, following revelations that Papara facilitated over 26,000 accounts for illegal betting transactions, worth a staggering ₺12.9bn (around €340m). 

The scandal underscores not only the scope of Turkey’s underground betting economy, but also the digital financial architecture that enables it. 

The government’s silence on Papara, beyond routine legal proceedings has raised eyebrows. As fintech expands and mobile payments surge, regulators seem reluctant to confront the platforms that blur the line between convenience and criminality.

The timing is awkward. President Erdoğan’s approval ratings are at their lowest in years, following a wave of political arrests in Istanbul this May. 

In response, long fragmented opposition parties have found new momentum to attack Erdoğan’s regime, yet will not form a majority in Parliament to trigger a snap election, as was assumed following protests and strikes in May. 

Erdoğan’s conservative image has long rested on moral authority: anti-drug, pro-family, socially traditional. Yet gambling, especially when enabled by financial actors with AK Party links, threatens to puncture that narrative.

If Yılmaz’s remarks were intended as a warning shot, they may also be a signal of internal rifts within the administration—between technocrats who see the policy gap and party loyalists unwilling to fill it.

Yılmaz posed a simple question at the council’s close: “Should we impose safeguards against gambling as we have for other digital threats?”

 It is a question few in Turkey’s ruling elite have dared ask. But if the government wishes to retain control of the national narrative on addiction, the time for political caution may be over.

Online gambling is not just a vice; it is a systemic risk—one that straddles public health, criminal finance, and political integrity. Leaving it unaddressed may not only jeopardize social stability. It may also cost the government its last claims to moral leadership.