Income inequality is AKP’s bread and butter. It masks everything. It makes Turkey look like a high middle income economy. Even though a large percentage of the population is poor, thanks to those billionaires, Turkey’s GDP per capita fits World Bank’s superficial definition of an upper middle income country (what an efficient way to use world’s most brilliant economists). More importantly, income inequality is what keeps that 40-50% bound to AKP. Having seen their incomes grow and seen what the top 10% can buy, AKP is their only shot at becoming like them. AKP is the way up the pyramid (to read more on this please refer to an earlier post – ‘Why do we drink?’ wp.me/p44ZHA-c). For these people, AKP’s infrastructure developments are more important than freedom of speech. The latter has no utility for them, the former does. A nation of oppressed underdogs: Turkey is stuck. Political tensions that we are witnessing today are but a result of Turkey’s non-workable growth model. Reforms pushed growth higher from 2002 to 2007, external borrowing pushed growth higher from 2008-2012 but come 2013 Turkey was out of fuel. With more than a decade in power, PM Erdogan ran out of enemies to blame. Today, the middle class drunkenness is slowly turning into a dreadful hangover as banks begin to cut off on lending and interest payments are eating away an ever-increasing share of meager incomes. Turkey needs to wake up. She needs to wake up now. We need to understand why AKP is still so successful; we need to stop marginalizing AKP’s voter base and treating them like traitors for their understandable trade-off between hard infrastructure and freedom. We need to understand that through income and opportunity inequality, AKP is feeding an illusion of middle class to people, hence buying out their votes. To do all this, the liberals need to first stop acting the like oppressed underdogs, a political strategy invented by PM Erdogan and that plagues a whole nation. It seems, in Turkey, everyone is an underdog; the liberals, the Gulenists, the Erdoganists. We all want to get rid of our respective oppressors but do not want to move a finger for it. We think our duty to the nation is fulfilled if we protest virtually. Yes, we sometimes go out to the streets and protest but how many of us tried to hear an AKP voter out? How many of us organized public discussion sessions between opposing political views? As Erdogan tries to polarize a whole nation for his personal ambitions, we must stand together against it, not fall victim to it. Only then can we claim victory. econoscale/2014/03/23/engineering-turkeys-middle-class-and-maslowian-politics/
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 14:29:14 +0000
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