Turkey election pledges foretell bigger budget deficit (Al Monitor, April 30, 2023)

Both the government and the opposition have made a seemingly endless stream of economic pledges in the run-up to Turkey’s crucial May 14 elections.

As voters grapple with the worst cost-of-living crisis under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s two-decade rule, Erdogan has expanded his pledges almost by the day, feeling the heat of opinion polls that have shown him increasingly trailing his main challenger. Though Turkey’s opinion polls are usually taken with a grain of salt, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the joint presidential candidate of a six-party opposition alliance, appears ahead of Erdogan in the most recent surveys, and some observers believe he could even clinch victory in the first round of what is expected to be a close race. An Al-Monitor/Premise polled released this week showed the two main contenders statistically tied in the event of a runoff.

Erdogan’s spending spree ahead of the elections and the whirlwind of pledges by both sides raise the specter of a budget deficit unseen in the past two decades and further impediments to controlling inflation.

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/04/turkey-election-pledges-foretell-bigger-budget-deficit