The distance between Europe and Erdogan's Turkey is widening every day. The latest sign of crisis came a few hours ago with the decision of the Council of Europe to open ainvestigation against Ankara for the imprisonment of Osman Kavala, the industrialist for years in jail without trial (and without evidence) for having participated in the attempted coup against the "sultan". Erdogan.
The new outcry falls in an exacerbated economic situation, if not desperate. Over the last two months, the signs of collapse of the Turkish lira, dragged down by a policy of rate cuts that tastes like suicide. Since October 21, the date on which Turkey was included in the list of countries in the odor of laundering, thus complicating the search for new international financing for the banking system, the central bank (affected by a barrage of layoffs from the governor downwards) he lowered the interest rate lever from 18 to 15 per cent, regardless of the consequences on the currency, which has fallen by a generous 40 per cent since the beginning of September with an immediate impact on imports and, consequently, on inflation. But Erdogan did not repent. On the contrary. In the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, the new central banker was appointed in the figure of Nureddin Nebati, an industrialist who figures among the most convinced admirers of Erdogan's economic policy who, with singular perseverance, maintains that low rates (in line with his reading the Koran which prohibits usury) are a remedy against inflation. A thesis so far denied by the facts but, claims the new governor "only because the line has not been followed with the right perseverance".
In short, the economic suffering of a country already on a path of robust growth risks not ending there. The balance of payments collapse it has not been arrested by the measures imposed to protect the currency, which have seriously affected the country's reserves. And the chronicles report of the growing discontent in large sections of the population: not even construction, favored by low interest rates, seems able to get by given the disappearance of foreign investors and the decline in the purchasing power of the middle class. It is easy to predict that the president's system of power will be put to the test in the coming months, with significant repercussions for relations with the European Union (which finances Turkey in an anti-immigration function) and the system of international relations, given the weight of Ankara in Libya or in the gas-rich eastern Mediterranean.
But the Turkish crisis will not have the dramatic consequences it would have had a few years ago in terms of relations with the EU (and with Italy in particular). The main Italian groups, see Unicredit for example, have left the Crescent or have largely reduced their commitment (think of the sale of Astaldi's Bosphorus bridge). A completely different picture from that of the beginning of the millennium, when the then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was a witness at the wedding of Bilal, the president's third son. The decline of ties with Turkey allows us to look at the crisis of the global economy a twenty years since the birth of the BRICS, the formula of extraordinary impact coined by Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs a couple of months after the attack on the Twin Towers, a turning point to broaden development in a post-ideology world, ready to remove Evil. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) were the elite body of the emerging countries. Behind them, the Next Eleven patrol (among which Turkey excelled) was preparing to join them thanks to double or triple growth rates compared to those of the old West.
It didn't happen that way. Twenty years later we note that only a handful of producers of sensitive raw materials remain hooked to the bandwagon of global finance, which has rewarded only China and some countries that excel in education (South Korea, Taiwan) while others, among such as Turkey, are struggling to find a way of development and fall into the whirlpools of a de-globalized world, where democracy and civil rights are struggling to establish themselves. The difficulties of Turkey, a country with a deeply rooted secular and democratic culture, are there tip of the iceberg of an increasingly divided world in the face of challenges that, from the environment to Omicron, concern us all closely.
