Inflationary economy, inflationary rhetoric
While Europe and the whole world are living with the anxiety of a nuclear “accident,” which may be caused by the vindictive revisionism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Greece is living with the anxiety of a another “accident,” which could be caused by the expansionist, Ottoman-inspired revisionism of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Russian president has to deal with repeated defeats on the battlefields, but also the refusal of a significant part of Russian society to become an expendable element of the war machine; a refusal that manifests itself massively and in various ways, despite the risk of arrest and punitive imprisonment.
His main interlocutor, the president of Turkey, has his own serious problems. Most serious of all – although he himself would never admit it – is inflation, now at over 86%, which is eroding the already meager incomes of Turkish citizens.
In early 2022, Erdogan was assuring Turks that he would quickly bring inflation down to single digits, while sticking to the spectacularly failed policy of low interest rates – supposedly dictated by the Quran. And instead of the single-digit rate, his country is jumping from one negative record to the next, heading for triple-digit inflation.
But this is not good at all for either the Turks or Greeks, given that geography and history bind the two neighboring peoples like communicating vessels. For every 10-point increase in inflation, Erdogan, his ministers and his far-right government allies in turn raise their rhetoric with chauvinistic acrimony and vulgar derision against Greece.
The trick of nationalism does not reduce the inflation draining the lira, but it allows Justice and Development Party (AKP) officials to compete with the bellicose, expansionist talk of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
There are, of course, democratic Turkish politicians, supporters of peace and good-neighborly relations with Greece. But they are imprisoned, or have migrated.
The poisonous discourse that dominates Turkey with its intolerable censorship and media manipulation is ridiculously arrogant and childishly abusive. It sounds archaic, almost primitive, as if we are centuries or even millennia behind, when the opponents provoked each other by throwing brutal insults.
