Bad news comes from Turkey once again.

Consumer prices in February were 54 percent higher than in the same month last year.

Never in the past 20 years has the currency devaluation been as high as it is today.

This is also bad news for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has ruled the country for 20 years.

Anyone can see that a year before the elections, his economic and fiscal policies are steering the country not to new prosperity, but into an abyss.

Millions of increasingly impoverished Turks feel this directly, for whom the money to earn a living melts between their fingers like sand.

Energy prices climbed 83 percent and food prices rose 65 percent.

The end of the flagpole is far from being reached.

The increase in producer prices by an incredible 105 percent provides a foretaste, a wave of price increases that will also sweep over consumers in the coming weeks.

Monetary policy is fueling the fall in the lira

The causes of these catastrophe figures, which the statistical office published on Thursday, are essentially in the past.

The 45 percent depreciation of the lira against the dollar last year, fueled by incorrect monetary policy and interest rate cuts, has contributed to the fact that many more lira have to be paid for imports invoiced in dollars and euros.

However, the government had been able to mobilize domestic foreign exchange holdings through foreign loan assistance and dubious "currency insurance", which supported the currency for a time.

However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its consequences for the global economy are dashed hopes for a stabilization of the lira and the economic situation in Turkey.

Above all, the skyrocketing prices for oil and gas, which the country urgently needs to import, are already tearing huge gaps in the trade balance, which Erdogan wanted to compensate for by boosting exports.

These serious consequences for Turkish prices will only be experienced in the coming months.

Ukraine war is likely to affect tourism

An end to the market turbulence is not in sight.

As long as Russia's President Vladimir Putin does not stop his murderous war against Ukraine, they will continue to unleash their destructive force in Turkey, even though their government has made a slim move and refused to impose economic sanctions on Russia.

For Turkey, however, this war harbors another, darker side.

This year, after two years of Corona, tourism should fully develop again and fill the country's empty foreign exchange coffers.

Great hopes were placed on vacationers from Russia and the Ukraine, who made up more than a quarter of the visitors last year.

But the travel industry is already calculating with losses of 30 percent - a horror scenario.

High revenue shortfalls are also evident in the national budget.

Because the government is trying to cushion the rapid inflation with more help for the population on the one hand, and on the other hand it is reducing the value added tax on energy and food.

These financial gaps have to be plugged, and the payments have to be counter-financed.

The same applies to the unforeseeable costs that arose from promises made to those investors who exchanged gold, dollars or euros for lira.

Calculated currency losses are to be reimbursed from the state budget at the end of the investment period.

Turkey's financial policy prospects, which are already not bright due to wrong monetary and financial policies, are rapidly darkening under the impression of the geopolitical upheavals and thus also those for an economic improvement.

The worst is yet to come.

Turkey faces difficult months.