On Istanbul streets, defiant Turks see US hand behind currency crisis
ISTANBUL: Serap, a 23-year-old clerk at a clothes store in central Istanbul, is sure of who to blame for the precipitous slide in Turkey’s lira currency.
“This crisis is created by America,” she said. The lira has lost more than 35 percent against the dollar this year and hit a fresh low on Friday, its biggest one day fall since Turkey’s 2001 financial crisis.
Food, rents and fuel prices in Turkey have all surged. The state pipeline operator last week raised the price of natural gas for electricity production by 50 percent.
Serap’s sentiments about the causes of the crisis are shared by many Turks and hint at why support for President Tayyip Erdogan, who won re-election in June with super-charged presidential powers, looks untouched, at least for now. His loyal supporters see the currency sell-off as a US attempt to undermine their country and president.
“If they have their dollars, we have our people, our God,” Erdogan said in a speech overnight, casting the lira’s slide as a campaign against the nation. The comments dominated Turkey’s overwhelmingly pro-government media on Friday. Newspapers and TV stations have cast the lira crisis as a political assault, spiralling out of US sanctions imposed on two Turkish ministers last week in a row over the detention of a US evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson.
“They issued a scandalous decision last week about our ministers,” said Serap, the store clerk. She didn’t know exactly what steps Washington had taken against Turkey, but said her country would not be pushed around. “It’s not so easy to make us bow down to their demands.”
Opposition newspaper Sozcu this week showed Brunson, still under house arrest in western Turkey, launching a $100 note folded up as a paper plane. The lira sell-off, driven by fears about Erdogan’s influence over monetary policy and Turkey’s worsening relations with the United States, has sent tremors through global emerging markets and dominated international financial headlines. But the Turkish media has largely ignored the crisis, aside from covering Erdogan’s comments.
“The newspapers didn’t even report the natural gas and electricity price raises,” said Veysel, an Istanbul taxi driver. He said he learns about the slumping lira and steep fuel price rises when he fills up his tank or quizzes his passengers, rather than from the media. American crisis
Relations between Ankara and Washington have collapsed over the last year.
Further US measures are expected if the two NATO allies fail to resolve the Brunson dispute, as well as wider differences over issues including US sanctions on Iran and Ankara’s plans to buy a Russian missile defense system.
Erdogan has bitterly chastised the United States for failing to extradite a US-based cleric Ankara blames for a failed 2016 coup, supporting a Kurdish militia in northern Syria which Turkey says is a terrorist organization, and for demanding its allies comply with US sanctions on Iran.