AKP AND THE IMF

There's a pretty good analysis of the AKP's policies during it's tenure as the ruling party in Turkey, and it's available at the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Take a look at the following:

Many AKP voters share [this] hostility to the IMF. While Prime Minister Erdogan has said little publicly about the IMF, the AKP’s grassroots activists employ radical anti-IMF rhetoric to take advantage of this widespread sentiment. In fact, the country’s recent economic expansion has chiefly been based on IMF loans, speculative inflows, the growth of debt and current account deficits and, above all, the increased exploitation of the working class.

The fact is that during its period of government, the AKP turned into a loyal disciple of the IMF and its austerity programme. The government rushed through the massive and swift privatisation of public assets, passed a labour law based on the employer’s needs for a “flexible” work force, and launched major attacks on working people in the field of social security. At the same time, the agricultural policies of the AKP have prompted angry protests by farmers.

[ . . . ]

The AKP government has so far resisted pressure from the armed forces, as well its nationalist civilian supporters—the so-called “unarmed forces”—for a parliamentary vote on a cross-border military operation into neighboring Iraq. The AKP is well aware of the fact that such a move could jeopardise its electoral fortunes as well as “investor confidence.”

In the event of any international crisis, the fast-paced, yet fragile, economic growth in Turkey will end as it did in 1994, 1999 and 2001. Nevertheless, the government has emphasised the temporary economic recovery, and its propaganda has been taken up by much of the Turkish media, as well as the trade unions.

The reality is that this growth is not creating enough new jobs and has only stabilised the level of unemployment at 10 percent (this is the official rate for unemployment; the real rate is presumed to be higher). Some economists refer to this as jobless growth, and poverty still is prevalent. It is mainly bourgeois and upper middle-class layers who have benefited from the very fast economic growth. Nevertheless, many AKP voters still regard the present situation as preferable to the many economic crises and rampant inflation of the past.

The Islamist AKP is also able to rely on its own nationwide system of social support networks. While the central government carries out the dictates of the banks, which require painful cuts to the country’s welfare provision, AKP activists intervene at a grassroots level to offer some relief by providing charitable contributions to those who are worst hit. This is a typical feature of Islamists in different parts of the world. Privatisation, market reforms, the weakening of a public school system, etc., create more and more space for such Islamist social support work.

The AKP will most likely take the majority vote, especially in the central Anatolian region. With AKP as the ruling party once again, it will have to do what it can to reduce the threat the Turkish regime poses to its neighbors in order to comply with the requirements of the globalists, with whom it is in bed.

IMF meddling has the potential to utterly destroy the Turkish economy, exactly as happened in Argentina a few years ago, and there's more on Argentina's economic meltdown in an article that orginally appeared in the WaPo.

That globalization encourages the expansion of "Islamist social support work," is no problem for the vultures who force globalization under the guise of "democracy'; they are the same vultures who found it convenient to overlook the brutal religious fundamentalism of the Taliban in order to secure control of energy pipelines through Afghanistan.