Turkey’s cabinet meeting conveyed on April 12 amid pro-government media’s spins that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) ministers will announce new measures for current economic crisis, such as increase in pensions or additional holiday bonuses. They wrote that that the increase in the prices of basic goods to be precluded, the low-income citizens be protected from high cost of living, and “opportunitsts,” and contactors doing business with the public funds to be ensured against inflation and projects to be continued.
President Tayyip Erdoğan indeed gave some good news in his long press conference after the cabinet meeting. But none of them were of the kind to be a medicine for today’s troubles. Reading carefully between the lines, the reporters wrote that the wages and support premiums of each worker to be recruited for 3 or 6 months, depending on their job, will be covered by the Ministry of Labor, as a good news expected from the cabinet.
But even to hear this, people who expected good news for today, waited patiently for Erdoğan to give good news from the future in his long long speech which lasted longer than the fast-breaking hours.
According to Erdogan, there could be a bit of a problem today stemming from the “unbalanced price increases”. “Unfortunately, government have difficulty to get results” in its fight against price increases. “But the good days to come will be worth it,” he said. Yes, that’s exactly what he said.
What are the good news for the future?
“God Willing,” said the President, the AKP government will overcome inflation in the same way that it has brought the exchange rate under control. And then when the inflation was tackled, then the next generations will have a bright future.
He wasn’t kidding when he said future generations. Today, when the cost of living and the cost of living were really starting to hurt, and the President himself said that “unfortunately, government is unable to get results” while he was talking about the plans for 2053 and 2071.
The 2053 Transport and Logistics Plan, which Erdogan has chosen to announce in such a day when an increase in pensions and holiday bonuses is expected, is a really important plan. Turkey, a transportation base in the middle of the Europe-Asia-Africa triangle, a transportation infrastructure that focuses on railways, so many million passengers, so many billion dollars income… These are beautiful, but let’s get to the point: where are the good news about today? With all due respect to the President, isn’t this akin to Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel’s promise of “Bright horizons” while saying “The Treasury is in need of even 70 cents” on the one hand, in the dark late 1970s?
Does saying “we will save” save the election?
Before I forget: It did not go unnoticed that Erdogan reserved only a single sentence for the “Mega-Project” Kanal Istanbul by saying “it is of critical importance”. Kanal Istanbul seems to be out of the 2023 horizon at least; God bless to 2053.
Let’s go back to today.
“We will overcome today’s troubles,” Erdogan says to the citizen, showing the “Bright Horizons” of 2053.
Underneath this promise lies the message that people should vote for him in the 2023 elections, because the opposition will not be able to fix it. As it will be remembered, Erdogan said before the 2018 elections, “Vote for this brother of yours,” so that he would fix the currency problem, interest and inflation. We saw.
In fact, Erdogan does not actually admit that the responsibility is his. The culprit for this situation is clear in his mind: The Covid-19 epidemic and the Ukraine Crisis cause crisis everywhere. Of course, not everyone was caught in between those crises by the obsessive interest-inflation theses that have been followed since 2018. According to Erdoğan, his fault is not in foreign currency and interest games, but in his own wrong decisions.
Does giving good news about the future win Erdogan an election? Today, MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli spoke for the first time as if the opposition won.
As AKP’s lawmaker Ali İhsan Yavuz once said about the fraud claims about the local election of 2018, which AKP lost to CHP’s Ekrem İmamoğlu: “Something definitely happened even though nothing has happened.”
