2023-05-13 16:32:08
Recep Tayipp Erdogan was the man who led the golden age of turkish economy which started around the turn of the millennium. After his rise to power in 2002, the president channeled the finances of the Anatolian country with conviction and firmness assisted by international aid. After a first decade of fat cows, everything changed. The unorthodox measures adopted by the leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the depreciation of the lira against the euro or the dollar and the runaway growth of inflation have increasingly tightened the screws on a citizenry whose purchasing power has gone down in the last 10 years. In this context, Türkiye will celebrate this Sunday presidential and parliamentary elections that seem decisive.
The polls predict a historic ‘surprise’. The latest data suggests that the opposition candidate would receive the 49.3% of the votes, while the current president would be five points below, at 43.7%. If neither of the two candidates obtains more than 50% of the votes, a second round will be held on May 28.
After nearly two decades without having the slightest chance of winning, the Turkish opposition has for the first time chances of seizing power. Such is the president’s fear of defeat that last Sunday Erdogan called on his voters to convince his relatives to vote for his party to “not have accidents this Sunday.”
economic disaster
In part, this possible electoral turnaround is due to the economic disaster. Officially, the inflation in the country is located on the 50% but independent studies and economic experts say the actual numbers could be more than double.
The opposition coalition, popularly known as the Table of Six, is aware of, and has focused its campaign efforts on, distancing itself from this series of Erdogan’s economic and authoritarian strategies. Headed by the leader of the secular, center-left political formation the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the opposition even has the support of the main Kurdish nationalist party.
It wasn’t always like this. In his early years, Erdogan led Turkey on the path of economic prosperity with the help of a program of the International Monetary Fund. With these funds and the progressive policies that his Executive was adopting, heto inflation, poverty and unemployment fell, and infrastructure and medical care improved remarkably. At the international level, Turkey was beginning to gain a place in the European club and was even taking on a relevant role in the Western bloc after becoming one of the most promising emerging economies.
Unorthodox policies
Years later, with the start of the authoritarian drift of the president and the change of political and economic line after the dismissal of his finance minister to name his son-in-law in the post, the lean cows became practically starving cows, on the brink of starvation. In recent years, Erdogan has changed his head of Finance at least three times and another four times as director ofl Banco Central. The unorthodox policies that he was approving then, during his attempt to centralize all economic decision-making power in his hands, such as lowering the interest rate despite galloping inflation, are now added to his desperate attempts to go back on a electoral process in which it is in a serious disadvantage.
This situation has developed an unprecedented inflationary crisis that multiplied by the ukrainian war, on which his Executive has not been significant in the western lines, and the rise in the prices of the energy of which Turkey is an importer, have led the president to deal an almost mortal blow to the economy. Until now, many Turks supported the figure of Erdogan because they saw in him the man who made possible a improvement of quality of life of the majority of the population with its economic policies and its international alliances. However, the economic challenges that the Turkish economy is now going through have cost it that support.
In a last effort to recover that popular feeling of approval, the Turkish president offered, for example, during the celebration of the end of Ramadan the waiver of stove gas and hot water bills of the next 12 months for all citizens. Similarly, the Turkish government continues to “buy votes” by applying social measures such as lowering the retirement age for certain population groups.
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