EA bus stop in the central Anatolian city of Gümüshane, where Erdoğan won 77 percent of the elections in 2018: last week, a primary school student hung up a notice here rebelling against poverty. Neither the identity nor the exact age of the student could be found out. It was written by hand: “Hasn’t a child a right to be happy? Was a poor child born to be poor here? Or did Allah send it to suffer from poverty? please help them . . .”
To the Turkish version of the column
Yazının Türkçe orijinalini okumak için tıklayın
This is a bitter example of the poverty suffered by the lower and middle classes in Turkey. Unfortunately, the student who posted the note is not an isolated case. Due to the economic crisis, millions of children have had to forego a fundamental human right: adequate nutrition. One in four students goes to school hungry, and lately there have been reports of children fainting from hunger at school. When it comes to child poverty, we rank second after Costa Rica. No wonder. In Turkey, where the poverty line is five times the minimum wage, the annual inflation rate for food has reached 102.5 percent even in palace-manipulated statistics. We’re European champions. We are not proud of it, rather we are poor.
Breakfast is priceless
As some of you know, white cheese is an indispensable part of a Turkish breakfast. The price has tripled over the past year. For the first time in our history, the price of white cow’s milk cheese has overtaken that of red meat. That’s because farmers have started slaughtering dairy cows because of a 140 percent increase in the price of agricultural produce. As a result, milk prices have risen two and a half times, and people in the lower and middle classes can only dream of a breakfast with white cheese. However, the government found a solution for this as well: newspapers controlled by the palace published articles with titles such as: “Be careful when eating white cheese! Those are the unknown damages.”
As poverty worsens due to Erdoğan’s odd economic theory that “interest rates are the cause, inflation is the consequence”, Turkey’s financial indicators are going haywire. The economic program launched by the government last year to reduce the foreign trade deficit, instead of plugging the hole, has caused it to grow threefold in the first ten months of this year. The downturn in the economy is fueling unemployment. In particular, well-trained skilled workers are no longer employed. In one Anatolian city, 72,000 people, including 10,000 with university degrees, applied for 230 vacancies for cleaning workers.
Bulent Mumay
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Image: private
Erdoğan, of course, takes no responsibility for this situation. As always, he lays the blame on scapegoats. Thanks to the economic theory he invented, inflation rose from 20 percent to over 85 percent in a year. If the population is dissatisfied with the rise in prices, the government points to supermarket chains. There were raids on supermarkets in front of the cameras. Erdoğan’s coalition partner, MHP leader Bahceli, called for an investigation into “the links between supermarkets and terrorist organizations”.