Erdogan’s “Interest-rate Lobby” and Other Stories

ErdoganCross-posted on the Corner:

So what have those scamps from Turkey’s “mildly Islamist” AK (the Economist) been talking about lately?

Here (reported in Hurriyet) is President Abdullah Gül, an individual generally seen as more emollient than thuggish Prime Minister Erdogan:

Islam and migrants have been a reality in Europe for centuries. As long as the continent of Europe doesn’t approach segments which are different from the majority with tolerance, particularly in regards to religion, an occurrence of new inquisitions and Holocausts, as well as incidents evoking Srebrenica, are probable.

Perfection it’s not, but Europe has, of course, handled its growing Muslim minority with a great deal of tolerance. Talk of new Holocausts is ludicrous. What Gül wants is deference, something else altogether.

And then there’s this (via Bloomberg):

The head of Turkey’s Capital Markets Board confirmed June 26 that his staff had begun an investigation into stock-market volatility during the protests. According to traders in Istanbul, the demands to hand over all e-mail traffic with foreigners, among other records, are unprecedented.

The board’s assurances that such investigations are routine might be easier to accept if Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan hadn’t promised to “choke” those he believes to have engineered the protests in order to cause a stock-market collapse. He has accused some companies of abetting “terrorism” and claimed that an ill-defined “interest-rate lobby,” committed to raising Turkish borrowing costs for profit, is part of the conspiracy.

Ah, “the interest-rate lobby”…

In recent days, Erdogan has threatened retribution against some of the country’s biggest banks and industrial conglomerates, leading to a steep fall in their share prices. He repeatedly said that Koc Holding AS, an industrial empire owned by a secularist family against which Erdogan bears deep grudges, “cooperated with terror” and “will have to account for it.” The alleged crime was opening the doors of one of the company’s hotels to protesters as they fled police.

Ugly though all this is, the fact remains that, despite a dip from previous highs, Erdogan is enjoying approval ratings of over 50 percent and his AK party is still the country’s most popular. That’s a matter for Turks to decide for themselves, of course, but, if, as Barack Obama, David Cameron and others would like, Turkey is admitted to the EU, the same electorate that so appreciates Erdogan will, thanks to its numbers, have a not insignificant influence on decisions that affect all EU citizens.

That does not strike me as a good idea.

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2 Responses to Erdogan’s “Interest-rate Lobby” and Other Stories

  1. William Burns says:

    Europe has handled its growing Muslim minority with a great deal of tolerance? Forgotten Bosnia and Kosovo already, have we? The Turks haven’t.

  2. Andrew Stuttaford says:

    William, I was referring the position of the immigrant population in the west of the continent (as was Gul), but I should have made that clearer. The horrors that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia, which included, of course, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ (a loathsome euphemism) of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs, were something else altogether, but what motivated them was a complex mix, including religious hatred, to be sure, but not only that.

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