The Turkish economy is going downhill.

We race down the slope like a car with bad brakes.

Twenty years ago, Erdoğan took over the wheel as a result of an economic crisis. Now he is steering the car exactly where he took it.

When the AKP came to power in November 2002, inflation in Turkey was thirty percent;

today, despite all sorts of manipulations on the part of the palace, it is as high as seventy percent.

According to the statistics controlled by Erdoğan, the price of staple foods has increased by three digits within a year.

Meat prices rose by over 100 percent, vegetables by 126 percent and fuel by over 207 percent.

We have overtaken Venezuela, which has been suffering from hyperinflation for years.

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Since our salaries have not increased, we have the cheapest labor force in Europe.

According to Eurostat figures, the average hourly wage in the EU is 28.60 euros.

We only earn an eighth of that.

An hourly wage is not even enough for a kilo of tomatoes.

These are workers' concerns.

What about the unemployed?

According to Eurostat data, twice as many people in Turkey are unemployed as the European average.

Almost half of the population is outside the labor market.

According to official figures, more than 440,000 people applied for unemployment benefits in the first three months of the year.

On Google, searches for “prayer to find work” increased by 1850 percent in one month.

Erdoğan lives in a dream world.

He considers everyone who complains about poverty and inflation to be ungrateful: "Unfortunately, in some circles there is ingratitude, dissatisfaction and pessimism." raised in a way that cannot be compared with the past.” Presumably, by the “people” he only means his own environment.

Because the population has long forgotten what the word prosperity actually means.

While 183 new school buildings planned for this year have been put on hold due to lack of funds, in addition to Erdogan's third palace, nine private villas for his ministers are still under construction, each for around one million euros.

A big promise made by Erdoğan was that he would put Turkey among the ten largest economies in the world.

He announced that we will achieve this goal in 2023, the 100th year of the founding of the Turkish Republic.

However, he recently said whether Turkey would make the top ten would depend on the election.

That is to say, if we re-elect him, he wants to realize what he hasn't managed to do in the last twenty years.

But the population does not believe that Erdogan will solve the economic problems.

According to the latest MetroPoll poll, 66.2 percent believe the government is unable to bring the economy back on track.

Erdoğan knows full well that the bill for all this will be presented to him in the June 2023 elections.

Now he is implementing a three-pronged strategy to prolong his political life.

The first step is to paralyze the opposition.

A few weeks ago he had human rights activists hit with severe sentences because of the Gezi protests, and the week before last he targeted the opposition leader CHP.

Canan Kaftancıoğlu, Istanbul's CHP regional leader and organizer of the campaign that defeated Erdogan in the 2019 local elections, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison and banned from politics for a tweet posted ten years ago.

This verdict suggests that repression of the opposition is likely to intensify.

On June 1st, the trial against Ekrem İmamoğlu,

one of Erdogan's closest competitors in 2023, for "insulting" members of the election commission who annulled the first round of local elections in 2019, which he had won.

In the last hearing, the prosecutor demanded that Ekrem İmamoğlu be banned from politics.

In addition, the verdict in the ban proceedings against the Kurdish party HDP is imminent.