Turkey’s Economic Precipice
Michael Rubin / Sept. 27, 2015
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Justice and Development Party,” best known by its Turkish acronym AKP, was a breath of fresh air when it came to power after the November 2002 elections. In the five years before the AKP assumed power, Turkey’s currency devalued from around 200,000 to just over 1.7 million lira against the dollar. The Turkish public blamed the incumbents for a banking crises in November 2000, and then a currency crisis when, on a single day in February 2001, the Turkish lira lost one-third of its value. Incumbent parties bickered and corruption scandals swirled around them. The AKP cultivated an image of cleanliness and piety, even as Erdoğan, its leader and, from February 2003, prime minister, had more than a dozen corruption cases hanging over him from his tenure as mayor of Istanbul. Regardless, the AKP was pragmatic. It focused on the economy first and foremost. In the first two years of AKP rule, the currency stabilized and actually strengthened against the dollar. Some of this stability was the result of new technocrats taking a fresh look at the economy and proposing solutions which previous political paralysis prevented, but Turkish budgetary authorities and many established journalists privately suggested some of the AKP’s accomplishments rested upon an influx of so-called “Green Money,” provided by interests in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and used as an off-books slush fund by Erdoğan and his team.
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