Latin America should follow Erdoğan's lead
After visiting Bolivia, Cuba and Mexico last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is continuing his tour of Latin American countries in Chile, Ecuador and Peru. Indeed, Turkey and Latin America have economic and political histories that share many similarities. At one time there was a generally held opinion in Turkey that whatever economic or political change occurred in Latin America would happen in Turkey nearly a decade later. I think the most important thing that made this idea popular was the fact that Turkey experienced a military coup on Sept. 12, 1980, which was similar to the one that General Augusto Pinochet staged in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973. Pinochet's military junta came to power in the country by murdering then Chilean President Salvador Allende in a bloody coup d'état. Today, Chile's elected President Michelle Bachelet is hosting Turkey's first popularly elected President Erdoğan in Santiago. Indeed, we cannot say that Erdoğan's story is very different from those of former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, former Argentinean President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.
Erdoğan hails from a rightist tradition that aims for a reformist society, taking a stand against military coups and highlighting an open market economy. This tradition has a democratic core, which develops politics against statist, secular and bureaucratic governments in Turkey. Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), a self-styled social democrat leftist party, cannot represent the international left in a real sense, since it upholds a statist, bureaucratic and secular unilateralism. Quite the contrary, the rightist democratic understanding, which is based on the inclusive and pacifistic aspects of Islam, argues for a supra-national inclusiveness that goes beyond the borders of nation states. Based on this point of view, Prof. İdris Küçükömer, a famous Turkish thinker and economist, said "The left is the right and the right is the left in Turkey."
The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which was founded by Erdoğan, went into a major showdown with the pre-coup tradition, as in Latin America, and faced attempts of closure by the Constitutional Court in 2008. As is known, since the early 2000s, Latin America has seen reformist governments reject the tradition of military coups and fight them every level. These governments started to revise the neoliberal economic policies that plundered the resources of the continent during the 1970s and 1980s, and maintained the economic understanding of the pro-coup politics that confined their industries to a vicious debt cycle.
Lula da Silva, Kirchner, Bachelet, Ecuador President Rafael Correa and Bolivia President Evo Morales ushered in a new period in Latin America at the beginning of the 21st century and signified an escape from the darkness of the previous century. This escape, as well as the presidents who represented it, faced a lynching attempt and a wave of disinformation, firstly from U.S. and U.K. media outlets and then from the local media. So, they failed to carry out many of the reforms they wanted. Nevertheless, this group of presidents abandoned the exploitative privatization practices and took steps for a more efficient evaluation of basic export resources such as oil and natural gas. They also put new social policies in place, albeit partially, and formed an economic integration organization among the Latin American countries. For instance, unions such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) undertook tasks such as integrating economic policies into social areas, increasing investment rates and making the trade between countries effective. In the history of Latin America, these bodies are the first effective integration institutions that are independent from the U.N. and the U.S. The CELAC has played a great part in the removal of embargoes on Cuba. Furthermore, the Unified System for Regional Compensation (SUCRE) focused on a new trade and currency system that would replace the U.S. dollar, paving the way for the founding of Banco del Sur (the Bank of the South), which can be taken as a local equivalent of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2009. The bank was established to provide funds like the IMF and support infrastructure investments like the World Bank. Additionally, Gran Gasoducto del Sur (Venezuela-Argentina Gas Line) aimed to connect Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Bolivian and Argentinean energy resources to each other, transfer funds from the countries with surpluses to the countries with deficits in an efficient way. (Some of Turkey's steps, such as the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) bear resemblance to these bold measures).
All these steps had economic and political results. Firstly, the poverty that overwhelmed 48.4 percent of Latin America in 1990, dropped to 28 percent in 2014. Moreover, a strong middle class emerged in Latin America as in Turkey. For instance, the number of those who generate income four times as much as the poverty threshold in Brazil has increased by 38 million and has reached 61 million over the past decade. In this process, these countries were criticized for aiming for a statist and closed economy. Bolivia came under the most fire on this issue, probably because it attracted the greatest foreign direct investment (FDI) in the continent over this period of time and the country won the highest FDI in terms of its ratio to gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013.
This process accompanied an intense political siege for countries of the continent. The local capital holders and global financial capital holders who wanted to return to the past launched an intense disinformation campaign against the governments that initiated these steps. Corruption claims about Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's rule brought street protests to the country. A new process of reactionary restoration was initiated through the problems of structural and historic underdevelopment, such as poverty and corruption. The elected governments were undermined and they started losing elections as in Argentina.
This is because presidents who come from the leftist tradition in Latin America failed to develop a new and inclusive growth path as an alternative to neoliberal policies. They believed that they would return to old pre-coup Latin America, thinking that the only alternative to neoliberal policies was a statist and Peronist closed economy. Now they are suffering the bitter consequences of this belief, as falling commodity prices bring along high debts for many Latin American countries. I think Latin America's leftist presidents should pay attention to Erdoğan's remarks about the economy.
Erdoğan hails from a rightist tradition that aims for a reformist society, taking a stand against military coups and highlighting an open market economy. This tradition has a democratic core, which develops politics against statist, secular and bureaucratic governments in Turkey. Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), a self-styled social democrat leftist party, cannot represent the international left in a real sense, since it upholds a statist, bureaucratic and secular unilateralism. Quite the contrary, the rightist democratic understanding, which is based on the inclusive and pacifistic aspects of Islam, argues for a supra-national inclusiveness that goes beyond the borders of nation states. Based on this point of view, Prof. İdris Küçükömer, a famous Turkish thinker and economist, said "The left is the right and the right is the left in Turkey."
The Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which was founded by Erdoğan, went into a major showdown with the pre-coup tradition, as in Latin America, and faced attempts of closure by the Constitutional Court in 2008. As is known, since the early 2000s, Latin America has seen reformist governments reject the tradition of military coups and fight them every level. These governments started to revise the neoliberal economic policies that plundered the resources of the continent during the 1970s and 1980s, and maintained the economic understanding of the pro-coup politics that confined their industries to a vicious debt cycle.
Lula da Silva, Kirchner, Bachelet, Ecuador President Rafael Correa and Bolivia President Evo Morales ushered in a new period in Latin America at the beginning of the 21st century and signified an escape from the darkness of the previous century. This escape, as well as the presidents who represented it, faced a lynching attempt and a wave of disinformation, firstly from U.S. and U.K. media outlets and then from the local media. So, they failed to carry out many of the reforms they wanted. Nevertheless, this group of presidents abandoned the exploitative privatization practices and took steps for a more efficient evaluation of basic export resources such as oil and natural gas. They also put new social policies in place, albeit partially, and formed an economic integration organization among the Latin American countries. For instance, unions such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) undertook tasks such as integrating economic policies into social areas, increasing investment rates and making the trade between countries effective. In the history of Latin America, these bodies are the first effective integration institutions that are independent from the U.N. and the U.S. The CELAC has played a great part in the removal of embargoes on Cuba. Furthermore, the Unified System for Regional Compensation (SUCRE) focused on a new trade and currency system that would replace the U.S. dollar, paving the way for the founding of Banco del Sur (the Bank of the South), which can be taken as a local equivalent of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2009. The bank was established to provide funds like the IMF and support infrastructure investments like the World Bank. Additionally, Gran Gasoducto del Sur (Venezuela-Argentina Gas Line) aimed to connect Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, Bolivian and Argentinean energy resources to each other, transfer funds from the countries with surpluses to the countries with deficits in an efficient way. (Some of Turkey's steps, such as the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) bear resemblance to these bold measures).
All these steps had economic and political results. Firstly, the poverty that overwhelmed 48.4 percent of Latin America in 1990, dropped to 28 percent in 2014. Moreover, a strong middle class emerged in Latin America as in Turkey. For instance, the number of those who generate income four times as much as the poverty threshold in Brazil has increased by 38 million and has reached 61 million over the past decade. In this process, these countries were criticized for aiming for a statist and closed economy. Bolivia came under the most fire on this issue, probably because it attracted the greatest foreign direct investment (FDI) in the continent over this period of time and the country won the highest FDI in terms of its ratio to gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013.
This process accompanied an intense political siege for countries of the continent. The local capital holders and global financial capital holders who wanted to return to the past launched an intense disinformation campaign against the governments that initiated these steps. Corruption claims about Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's rule brought street protests to the country. A new process of reactionary restoration was initiated through the problems of structural and historic underdevelopment, such as poverty and corruption. The elected governments were undermined and they started losing elections as in Argentina.
This is because presidents who come from the leftist tradition in Latin America failed to develop a new and inclusive growth path as an alternative to neoliberal policies. They believed that they would return to old pre-coup Latin America, thinking that the only alternative to neoliberal policies was a statist and Peronist closed economy. Now they are suffering the bitter consequences of this belief, as falling commodity prices bring along high debts for many Latin American countries. I think Latin America's leftist presidents should pay attention to Erdoğan's remarks about the economy.