It turns out not all elections are about the economy. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared victory at the weekend in the presidential election run-off, extending his term in charge of Turkey’s $900 billion economy for another five years. He stays in power despite an acute cost of living crisis, with inflation hovering at around 45 per cent and the lira losing a fifth of its value in the past year. This is a crisis largely of Erdoğan’s making: he believes higher interest rates push inflation up, not down, so should be kept low (a theory, the Economist says, that is as popular among economists as alchemy among scientists). In his victory speech, Erdoğan insisted he would stick with his low-interest rate policy.
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