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Over the past five years of Erdogan's rule, the Turkish lira has lost 80% of its value against the USD. Does that benefit rural people? They need to get over t

• zrn900 3y ago
  > Over the past five years of Erdogan's rule, the Turkish lira has lost 80% of its value against the USD And just in the last 2 years, inflation skyrocketed in the US and entire Europe. > Does that benefit rural people? But really not good for Turkish people, whether urban or rural, secular or religious.) The rural people don't buy imported goods or imported cars - they live in the domestic economy. Moreover, Erdogan's party keeps supporting these people through its municipalities, through social programs, or outright through the religious sects it controls. Islamic capital in Turkey is gigantic and it is literally a state within the state. Its entirely capable of providing everything to its adherents - which is how the Islamists came to power in the early 2000s in the first place. Inflation is a killer for the life standards of the secular modernist minority, that is true. They are the ones who use imported goods (from software to computers to cars) the most. Moreover, the state taxes them in exacting fashion through their salaries whereas most of the rural economy and Islamic capital acts through trade, which is very lightly taxed ( the taxes are high, but enforcement is very difficult - sometimes knowingly), and as a result Erdogan's government has been taking the wealth from the secular minority and distributing it to the rural poor for a long while: having the secular lift the rural poor up involuntarily - something M. Kemal wanted, advocated and started as the early educated secular who were educated on the state's expense were supposed to industrialize the country and bring everyone out of poverty (in a literal socialist fashion). But the later generations of secular became petty bourgeois, living in their comfortable bubble on the backs of the poor majority while ignoring everything Kemal stood for. The result was the rise of Islamist sects, the Islamic capital and their coming to power in the early 2000s. On top of this, the secular is an aging and disappearing demographic, with the bulk of their voters being in their late 60s and 70s now. (the final generation that became adults in pre-1980-coup semi-socialist Turkey). The votes of CHP are augmented only by the votes of Kurds and Kurd left-wingers (who the post-coup governments weren't able to root out) when there isn't a party in partnership in the election with a Kurdish party. Erdogan used to do that but in this election, he doesn't seem to have done it. He wont make that mistake in the general election. Long story short, the secular segment is set to wane as a voter demographic in the next 5-10 years and visibly disappear in the next 10-15 years as even their actual physical population is declining due to low birth rates. Only a return to the Kemalist roots of the party can save CHP and the secular minority. And I don't think its likely. The US-backed 1980 coup did everything in its power to kill all the left-wingers and then raise the subsequent generations of youth as apolitical or right-wing. And by 'kill', I meant actually hanging ~10,000 left-wingers by calling them terrorists, then moving on to murder another 30,000 of them in the following decades. Those who weren't killed were jailed for decades. The education system was totally overhauled to raise children in a totally apolitical manner, and universities were repressed even more to prevent any left-wing thought. Generations of youth were raised apolitically or as petty bourgeois. As a result, the current generations of adults from the secular minority don't adhere to any of Kemal's ideals other than secularism. They are pretty much 'somewhat liberal' petty bourgeois. Gen Z could be a hope. But their time is still a decade or two in the future...