De klucht die Turkije is, zette zichzelf vandaag weer op de Kluchtige Kaart met het ontslag van de nationale chef statistiek.

Het is weer eens wat anders dan het ontslaan van een gouverneur van de centrale bank, moet president Erdogan gedacht hebben, die met het ontslag van het hoofd van het nationaal bureau voor Turkse statistiek dit weekend zijn bevolking te kennen geeft een soort complotdenker te zijn.

Turkish dictator president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sacked the head of the state statistics agency, according to a decree published this weekend, after releasing data showing last year’s inflation rate hit a 19-year high of 36.1%.

Maar goed, beter gaat het in Turkije nog steeds niet:

Sait Erdal Dincer was just the latest in a series of numerous economic dismissals by Erdogan, who has sacked three central bank governors since July 2019, and countless ministers. As AFP notes, Erdogan has railed against high interest rates, which he believes cause inflation, the exact opposition of conventional economic thinking.

Overigens gelooft in Turkije niemand de cijfers van het statistiekbureau nog:

Hilariously, the 2021 inflation number published by Dincer angered both the pro-government and opposition camps. The opposition said it was understated, claiming that the real cost of living increases were at least twice as high.

Het zat er eigenlijk al enige tijd aan te komen:

In December, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu was refused an appointment with Dincer and turned away by security guards when he sought to enter the statistic agency’s headquarters in Ankara. He had accused the agency of “fabricating” the numbers to hide the true impact of the government’s policies and slammed it as “no longer a state institution but a palace institution”, in reference to Erdogan’s presidential complex.
Erdogan meanwhile criticized the statistics agency in private for publishing data that he felt overstated the scale of Turkey’s economic malaise.

En ook statisticus Dincer was het zich bewust:

Realizing what was coming, Dincer was resigned to his impending fate: “I sit in this office now, tomorrow it will be someone else,” he said in an interview with the business newspaper Dunya earlier this month.
“Never mind who is the chairman. Can you imagine that hundreds of my colleagues could stomach or remain quiet about publishing an inflation rate very different from what they had established?”
“I have a responsibility to 84 million people,” he added.
Erdogan did not explain his decision to appoint Erhan Cetinkaya, who had served as vice-chair of Turkey’s banking regulator, as the new state statistics chief.

Er lijkt meer slecht nieuws aan te komen. President Erdogan is druk bezig met nieuwe benoemingen:

Also on Saturday, Erdogan appointed a new justice minister, naming former deputy prime minister Bekir Bozdag to replace veteran ruling party member Abdulhamit Gul.
“I have resigned from my duties at the ministry of justice, which I have been serving since July 19, 2017,” Gul wrote on Twitter. “I would like to express my gratitude… for accepting my request,” he added, without explaining his decision.

En dat allemaal middels een beproefd Ottomaans principe. Als het beleid niet goed uitpakt is het de schuld van de grootvizier of ander personeel. Sultan Recep I lijkt te willen beproeven in hoeverre hij dat op de huidige dag kan volhouden: we tellen af naar uiterlijk 2023, als Turkije verkiezingen voor het presidentschap houdt.

“The justice minister is being replaced, (statistics agency) TUIK chairman is being dismissed before the inflation data is published. Nobody knows why,” he said. “The authoritarian alliance… keeps on harming the country,” he said, referring to the AKP and its nationalist partner MHP.

De frustratie van de oppositie is enorm, maar ze zullen moeten wachten tot 2023, en dan kijken wat voor konijn de president onder zijn tulband vandaan tovert.

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Meer over Turkije (hier) onder Erdogan op Veren of Lood vindt u hier.