African indigenous knowledge, chronicled in the World Bank Group (WBG) archives in New York under the IK category, observes: “Obulahya, bubanza kala” – meaning a festival, public function, or occasion that would tick sends early-like messages across – the opposite of which, of course, applies as well, based on what we study in Physics and experience in real life. That, for every positive, like virtue (love), there is a negative, like vice (hatred).
Looked at from this perspective, what constitutes the year 2025 for the Turkish individual, family, or society? Is it wellbeing or otherwise, focused on the direction of a delivering or faltering Turkish government under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AKP party? What is the year 2025 likely to be? Good or bad? Does it show signs of confirming the African IK observation, with the English-language equivalent in the idiom of waking up on the wrong side of the bed?
Two weeks into the first month of the new year, news flowing from Turkey conveys a wide variety of individual, social, economic, and political (di)stress packages. From the horse’s mouth, as much as it would have liked to paint a positive picture while compiling end-of-the-year 2024 figures, the government statistics agency, Türk-İş, could not avoid releasing figures very evident on the ground. It revealed a four-member family hunger threshold having reached 15,000 Turkish liras, and the poverty line having climbed to 45,000. A combination of these starkly naked truths paints a sad picture for the Turkish people in 2025, failing to make both ends meet – more so in the face of a monthly minimum salary level of 14,000 liras. What a new year!
Turkey sends messages across as a multi-faceted crisis country. It looks like the land of moral decadency, deficient rule of law, and democratic values, giving birth to 360 degrees of all sorts of crises – social, political, and economic – at home, regional, and international levels. It is the country going through cycles that have turned out to be really vicious for the country itself, its people, and the international community.
Other writings are on the wall. What does one make of Turkey where one man (Erdogan) acts as the complainant, investigator, prosecutor, lawmaker, trial judge, and prisons’ chief warder? The Turkey of 2025 literally has no parliament, judiciary, or executive worth the name in the democratic world. The condition of the commonly referred-to “Fourth Estate” in good governance – the media and its practitioners – is deplorable. Turkey is among the world’s worst jailers of journalists and other media personnel. Many of them are behind bars on flimsy charges or living in exile, while the surviving ones live on must-praise for Erdogan and dance to government tunes.
Turkey is one country where, irrespective of established and globally recognized economic policies, respective concepts, formulation, planning, implementation, and monitoring have to take place under the umbrella of the unorthodox Erdogan theories. Thus, all investment and fiscal monetary policy patterns ‘smell’ of Erdogan, with the expected results being high inflation rates and government unreliability, both of which scare away and finally chase foreign investment inflows and discourage domestic commitments. Official inflation has been put at crossing the 50% mark, while independent studies say the real rate is more than 100%.
While it is held that youth constitute tomorrow’s nation, Turkey is facing an unemployment rate of 25% among them. Some children live with their mothers in jail, while others have been refused the chance for free treatment abroad due to their parents’ real or perceived links with the Hizmet Movement.
If Turkey’s foreign policy were music, it would demand the caliber of composers like Johann Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach to avoid cacophony effects. Turkey is the country in which one man holds the foreign and security policy framework and chairs cross-border forced abduction operations.
Erdogan has all the way danced very craftily on regional and global conflict fences and managed to carry forward his mission. At the UN level, he has shed (crocodile?) tears for the Palestinian children while doing business with Israel. Erdogan has armed both Armenia and Azerbaijan in the same conflict and participated in holding peace talks. The Karabakh story. The Ukraine-Russian war is another similar area.
As of now, Erdogan has already integrated the controversially acquired sophisticated Russian ammunition with the Turkish defense system and still retains NATO’s strategic position. Erdogan has defied the rules of the European Council for Human Rights, ignored rulings of the respective court, and continues to get along with it.
Think of Erdogan’s involvement in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region conflicts, Libya in particular. Think of the role of Erdogan in the Syrian crisis – the way he has played his game to the fall of President Assad. And now he looks set to invade the north of the country and engage against the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) militia (PYD), which he considers the armed wing of the pro-Kurd Workers Party (PKK), which he asserts is terrorist.
This mission pitches him against the United States, Russia, Iran, and Israel. But, a hard nut to crack as he is, he would definitely not hesitate to hit Northern Syria targets under the anti-terrorism guise and later hold talks with these interested parties, so long as he will have achieved his goal. U.S. President-elect Trump has said: “President Erdogan is a friend of mine. He’s a guy I like and respect. I think he respects me also. But if you look at what happened with Syria, Russia was weakened, Iran was weakened. And he’s a very smart guy. He sent his people in there through different forms and names, and they went in and took over.”
In the eyes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Erdogan is good company, but also someone to deal with cautiously because he would go all out to achieve what he thinks is good (for himself) at whatever cost. So, in a way, Erdogan is a good tool for keeping NATO member and allies’ affairs somehow destabilized, giving Russia some strategic comfort.
Lest we forget, Turkey is a country in scars. Taking the rule of law, for example, the Erdogan government identified 1.5 million for arrest and imprisonment. Freedom of information has since been greatly curtailed by the closure of the Zaman daily newspaper, which had a mass readership of five million. About 2,000 domestic educational institutions were confiscated, impacting about ten million people. Similar cases of a malfunctioning government system have continued to the present day.
All said, peace-loving Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who had been living in self-exile in the United States for about 25 years, died aged 83 years and was demonized by Erdogan. That sort of summed up reasons for which Turkey and its people symbolically woke up on the wrong side of the year 2025. And the remedy lies mainly in one thing: that is, respect for the rule of law, the consequence of which would be opening doors to justice and trust. This is all that Turkey needs.
