Turkey’s economic crisis has a simple enough diagnosis and a textbook cure. Whether the patient will accept it, however, depends largely on president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who now holds unprecedented powers in the country, as well as his mercurial US counterpart, president Donald Trump. The two are involved in a tense geopolitical stand-off.
Turkey has been refusing US demands to release an American evangelical pastor, Andrew Brunson, who is facing charges of espionage and links to terror groups, and on August 10, Mr Trump tweeted that he had authorised a doubling of US import tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminium. He sent the tweet (“Our relations with Turkey are not good at this time!”) in the middle of a speech by Turkey’s new treasury and finance minister, Berat Albayrak – Mr Erdoğan’s son-in-law – whose appointment was only announced in July.
