Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday congratulated Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning Turkiye presidential elections for the fifth term. Taking to Twitter, PM Modi said that he was confident that India-Turkiye bilateral relations and cooperation on global issues will continue to grow in coming times. Other global leaders including United States President Joe Biden and top diplomat Antony Blinken, Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy among others greeted Erdogan on his run-off victory.
“Congratulations @RTErdogan on re-election as the President of Türkiye! I am confident that our bilateral ties and cooperation on global issues will continue to grow in the coming times,” the tweet read.
Congratulations @RTErdogan on re-election as the President of Türkiye! I am confident that our bilateral ties and cooperation on global issues will continue to grow in the coming times.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) May 29, 2023
While the win gives Erdogan a reason to celebrate, there is a list of challenges ahead of him to manage in Turkiye.
Turkiye’s Economic Stress
From a crippling economic crisis to a diplomatic standoff with allies, there’s a lot awaiting Erdogan. The cost-of-living crisis has eroded Turks’ purchasing power, with annual inflation running at around 40 per cent in April after it touched 85 percent last year, reported NDTV citing AFP.
Erdogan’s unorthodox policy of cutting interest rates in the belief they would lower inflation, has not wielded the results as expected. In February, the central bank justified its last cut of 0.5 percentage points as a way of supporting jobs and industrial production.
As per the report, the policy rate Turkiye set for banks is now far below that at which prices are rising. This essentially means that people are losing money if they leave it unspent in their accounts.
Turkiye’s currency lira has lost more than half of its value in two years and on Friday briefly traded at 20 liras to the dollar for the first time.
Sweden’s NATO Bid
Another problem is the NATO bid by Sweden. Turkiye’s partners are anxious for Ankara to lift its veto on Sweden joining the world’s most powerful defence alliance.
Notably, AFP reported, Stockholm applied to join with Nordic neighbour Finland in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, Ankara blocked the bids as it demanded the extradition of Turkish figures suspected of links to outlawed Kurdish militants.
Relation With Syria
Both Turkiye and Syria witnessed a catastrophic earthquake shackling the country brutally. But Turkiye’s relation with Syria became severed after Erdogan backed opposition forces who took up arms to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad during the country’s long and bitter civil war, AFP said.
In 2016, Ankara launched the first of several incursions against jihadist and Kurdish fighters in northern Syria. Agency said that Erdogan has attempted to mend ties in recent months, but Russian-mediated talks have failed to normalise diplomatic relations.
As a precondition to any meeting with Turkiye’s head of state, Assad has asked for the withdrawal of Turkish forces from rebel-held parts of northern Syria whereas Turkiye also sought to return the more than three million Syrian refugees who made the country home after fleeing the conflict.
Earthquake Reconstruction
The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck wreaking havoc in Turkiye killed over 50,000 people and reducing entire cities to mounds of rubble. Apart from loss of lives, the economic and social challenges posed by the disaster remain at large almost four months on.
NDTV said citing AFP that the cost of the damage is officially estimated at more than $100 billion and the huge reconstruction effort is still at an early stage.
Reconstructing the economy and structures to stabiles the torn lives of people is a big challenge Erdogan faces.
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