2023-05-29 17:56:28
After his victory in the runoff election, major challenges await Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His country is in one of the worst economic crises in history. The devastating earthquake in early February reduced entire cities to rubble. Erdogan also has tricky tasks to solve in foreign policy. His biggest construction sites at a glance:
Inflation: Horrific living costs and dwindling purchasing power – Erdogan’s controversial economic policy has driven a large part of the population into poverty. Under pressure from the President, the Turkish central bank repeatedly lowered the key interest rate, to the astonishment of financial experts worldwide. Although this boosted production, it also contributed to the further fall in the value of the lira. In the fall, inflation reached a high of 85 percent compared to the previous year, in April the value was still at 40 percent. In the past two years, the lira has lost more than half its value – trading at a record low of 20 lira to the dollar on Friday just before the runoff. According to Ankara, it invested 25 billion US dollars (23.25 billion euros) in just one month to support the national currency. Sweden’s NATO accession: Turkey has been blocking Sweden’s admission to NATO for months – and is therefore in charge the Alliance summit in Vilnius in July. The approval of all alliance partners is required for the admission of a new member. The reason given by the Turkish government is that Stockholm offers refuge to Kurdish activists that Ankara regards as “terrorists”. Erdogan is demanding their extradition to Turkey. Due to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in May 2022, Sweden and Finland had given up their decades-long policy of military freedom from alliances and applied for NATO membership. Finland is now a member of NATO after Turkey gave the go-ahead at the end of March.Rapproach to Syria: Relations between Turkey and Syria are extremely strained due to Turkish support for rebels in northern Syria fighting against the government in Damascus. Erdogan had recently tried – with Russian mediation – to get closer to the Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad – but without success. As a precondition for a meeting, Assad demanded the withdrawal of Turkish forces from northern Syria – where Turkey has also been taking action against Kurdish and jihadist groups since 2016. Turkey is home to more than 3.4 million Syrian war refugees who Erdogan now wants to send back. In early May, he announced the construction of 200,000 homes in 13 different locations in northern Syria to allow for the “voluntary” return of at least a million people.Reconstruction after the earthquake: The quake in southeastern Turkey in early February killed 50,000 people , more than three million people left the region. Since then, many have been living in makeshift tent cities. Erdogan promised to rebuild 650,000 houses in the earthquake-affected areas as quickly as possible. According to the UN and Erdogan, the total costs for the damage caused by the catastrophe amount to more than 100 billion US dollars. At an EU donor conference in Brussels in March, seven billion euros were raised for Turkey and neighboring Syria, which was also hit by the earthquake.
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