An old saying attributed to a former president has become popular in Turkey as people have confronted astronomical price rises in recent months: “There is no government that cannot be brought down by an empty cooking pot.”
As a shrewd political operator gearing up for a re-election bid within a year, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan might be expected to heed the warning of a predecessor by tackling inflation that has hit an official rate of almost 80 per cent. Instead, the president has continued to pursue policies that experts have described as a giant economic experiment.
Erdoğan, who rejects the widely accepted economic wisdom that higher borrowing costs help to curb inflation, has sacked three central bank governors in the past three years and ordered a succession of aggressive interest rate cuts. His approach has stoked such strong inflation that the IMF predicts the rate of price rises in the G20 country this year will be outstripped only by Venezuela, Sudan and Zimbabwe.