Content area
Full Text
How can we account for the priority that Turkey's "Islam-sensitive " government has placed on adhering to the IMF's prescriptions for macroeconomic stability and fiscal restraint in lieu of its electoral promises to pursue a justice-oriented social agenda and aggressively tackle problems of poverty and unemployment? In this article this question is answered by analyzing the challenges posed by international factors (debt sustainability, pressures by the IMF and the EU), as well as domestic factors (the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) own unpreparedness, oppositional tactics by the secularist establishment) that have shaped the AKP government's economic policies.
When the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) swept into office in the November 2002 general elections, winning an overwhelming majority of seats in parliament, the immediate question on everyone's mind was what the party planned to do about the economy. The predominant issue throughout the election campaign was the dire state of the Turkish economy. The 2001 economic crisis in Turkey had set the record for the country's worst recession and the deepest decline in economic growth since World War II. The Turkish lira was devalued by nearly 50%, devastating the savings and incomes of, by some estimates, 95% of the population, and the poverty threshold fell below what it had been in 1994.' The major challenge confronting the economy, cautioned an Istanbul securities broker, was that "Turkey needs a government that will produce rabbits from its hat - without rabbits [imaginative and radical reforms] it cannot be done."2 Nevertheless, during its campaign the AKP presented no cogent economic strategy of its own, let alone an alternative to the IMF-steered (International Monetary Fund) program of the ousted Biilent Ecevit government.
The AKP faces a dilemma, similar to those faced by left-leaning politicians and political parties in Latin America, in that during election campaigns promises of poverty reduction and greater economic equality are made, but upon taking office, the hard realities of neoliberal free market policy demands weigh in. The usual response to this quandary, in Latin America as well as Turkey, has been to combine neoliberal market reforms with targeted clientelism and other forms of "neo-patrimonialism."3 The AKP's predecessors from the Motherland Party-led (ANAP, Anavatan Partisi) government of Turgut Ozal to the outgoing...