Erdoğan's non-stop 'shock therapy'

Mehmet Şimşek's economy program is popularly referred to as a madness package. For the first time in Turkey, it has become a hot topic that big companies, especially the constructors, who have been in the public mind with their public tenders, do not pay any taxes. Most people do not believe the official inflation rate, the number of refugees, etc. Even the remarks of those vacationing on Greek islands that “they don't charge for sunbeds and umbrellas” are more credible than any official statement on the economy.

All of this is triggered by the fact that the minimum wage was not hiked in July in the face of the skyrocketing cost of living and the lowest pension was reduced to a third of the hunger threshold. In any case, this is the agenda and the concern of two-thirds of the society. Every other terrible problem is quickly lost in the maelstrom of empty bank accounts that grow like a black hole.

What should Recep Tayyip Erdoğan do in such a situation?

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Canadian journalist and author Naomi Klein, who examines half a century of political economy and political change from the Chilean coup d'état to the Iraq war in her book The Shock Doctrine which was quite popular for a while, uses the concept of 'shock therapy', essentially an IMF prescription, to examine how a society is shattered through the use of force in order to open up the economy for full exploitation. 

In the introduction to the book, she makes a connection between 'shock therapy' and the torture during the Chilean coup. The aim of torture is to sever the link between the body being tortured and consciousness. As the body suffers, consciousness finds it difficult to grasp what is happening around it. Thus it becomes susceptible to inculcation. Analyzing the Chilean case, Klein points to a simple but effective formula developed to make society accept the process leading up to the coup: “Make the economy scream.” This was the way to shatter political understanding and torture society.

There is also a reverse version of 'shock therapy', which was largely popularized by Klein's book. You make politics scream in order to make them accept the current economic situation.

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Erdoğan demonstrated one of the purest examples of this in the currency crisis of the summer of 2018, less than two months into his presidential regime. He immediately said in the rally squares, “If they have dollars, we have Allah.” At a rally in Rize, he talked at length about the battle of Manzikert and said that they had started a new war of liberation. This 'over-inculcation’ targeting the mood of the masses actually worked.

There were shopkeepers wiping their noses with $1 bills on the street, pensioners saying “Why should we care about the dollar,” people queuing to exchange dollars, etc. Erdoğan attributed political value to the masses whose lives had become worthless. They were able to build an imaginary war on an imaginary front, against an imaginary enemy, under the slogan of “Allah against the dollar” with the comfort of not having any other organized political force against themselves, other than the ragtag crowds on the streets.

There is a reason for this reminder from the archives. Although Erdoğan has been in power for a long time, his 'one-man regime' is officially six years old. During these six years, economic problems and turbulence have never been lacking. And they have been rapidly getting worse for the people. For six years, Erdoğan has continued his 'shock therapy' without interruption. Therefore, the entire character of the presidential regime is determined by constant shocks. Every day, every moment, he has to give society a dose of pain, prevent it from focusing, and keep its consciousness open to inculcation. This is the only valid law.

Now, this law is once again being enforced relentlessly. From attacks on one of the most sensitive points of society such as animal slaughter to Instagram censorship, from the non-implementation of Constitutional Court decisions to the nationalist "wolf salute" signs, from turning the assassination of Haniyeh into a mourning ceremony inside to fake reactions to a cafe chain owned by Qatari capital despite all the trade, whatever is available at the moment is being used.

As long as these agendas dominate the public mind. As long as society cannot focus, cannot find the time to look up and think about what is going on for two minutes. After the defeat in the March 31st local elections, there should not be a real agenda of imposing the wreckage of the economy on the working people through new hikes, taxes, and wage savings through the program named after Mehmet Şimşek. Because a real alternative in politics can only be built on real problems.

In 2018, Erdoğan was able to create a 'dollar' enemy in the economy. But what should he say today? “If they have Mehmet Şimşek, we have Allah”?

Erdoğan is like a blank page. Since he cannot write the solutions to the real, painful issues of society on that page, he has to write something else every day.