President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday tore into Türkiye’s leading business group, the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSIAD), for critical remarks “overstepping their limits.”
“We already put an end to their conspiracies where they had authority over politics,” Erdoğan told a parliamentary meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in Ankara. Calling the business body a “bunch of bourgeois compradors,” Erdoğan said: “You are doomed to fail. We won’t let you make Türkiye a cheap market for global capital.” TÜSIAD, he said, must be held accountable for the economic and social costs they inflicted upon Türkiye for almost half a century.
TÜSIAD executive Ömer Aras has been under fire for remarks he made last week that judicial investigations into opposition leaders on charges of corruption had “shaken trust and damaged democracy.” Aras is being investigated for his remarks.
TÜSIAD's members account for 85% of Türkiye's foreign trade and 80% of corporate tax revenue.
"We independently and impartially put issues that will contribute to the welfare and development of our country on our agenda," TÜSIAD said in a separate statement after Aras' initial remarks at an event of the association, without specifically mentioning the investigation. Government officials said Aras' comments aim to interfere with ongoing judicial processes. The opposition has insisted legal probes and detentions are designed to hurt their electoral prospects, criticism Erdoğan’s government has dismissed, stressing that the judiciary is independent. Aras has listed investigations into mayors charged with links to terrorists and corrupt businesspeople and an investigation into far-right party leader Ümit Özdağ, as well as the arrest of a prominent talent manager for celebrities over links to notorious Gezi Park riots in 2013. None of those investigations have concluded, but prosecutors cite strong evidence that is sufficient to keep them in custody before their trials.
The business body was founded in 1971, one month after a controversial military memorandum to the government that is viewed as a coup. As the memorandum forced Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel out of office and led to the closure of the National Order Party of Necmettin Erbakan, political mentor of Erdoğan, TÜSIAD brought together 12 of the richest people in the country, whose goal was "to help Türkiye to reach the level of Western civilizations through democratic and planned development," according to its charter.
The 1970s was a time of political turmoil, and the coup (as the coup's leaders intended) failed to stop it. It was a time of rising opposition to the private sector. Yet, the TÜSIAD moved forward. In 1979, it first attempted "the conspiracy" Erdoğan referred to on Wednesday. Taking out full-page ads in national newspapers, TÜSIAD targeted the government led by Bülent Ecevit of the Democratic Left Party (DSP). It instructed the government to correct the economic issues it blamed on corruption. The ads lashed out at "extreme intervention" in the economy by the government and called for the flow of foreign capital.
Ecevit was the first leader to openly hit out at TÜSIAD, accusing it of attempting "to kill the government" and branding the moves a threat to the government via an "ultimatum." But the government ultimately "died" with the 1980 coup. The coup played into the hands of TÜSIAD members as the junta banned strikes, put a freeze on wage rises and scrapped labor rights. Labor union representatives were arrested, and unions themselves were shut down as the junta hunted down both right-wing and left-wing activists. TÜSIAD escaped the fate of thousands of associations shut down by the junta and, in 1981, was granted a special status by the junta-controlled government. TÜSIAD's earlier calls to the pre-coup government became economic policies of the junta, while the association's member companies saw their profits skyrocket in the coup era.
Deputy Prime Minister Tansu Çiller had accused TÜSIAD of betraying the country when it blamed the government for economic woes and issued an ultimatum similar to the one it had directed at Ecevit. The business association was among the main opponents of Çiller's government with Erbakan's Welfare Party (RP), which eventually collapsed when the military carried out a so-called "postmodern coup" similar to the 1971 one.
TÜSIAD is accused of being a member of a notorious "gang of five" that included labor unions and two other business associations in the process leading up to the 1997 coup. They were supporters of informal opposition to the coalition government, along with the judiciary, academia and media. The intense campaign against the government paved the way for the military to push the government out of office. TÜSIAD was also among supporters of anti-government rallies in the early years of the AK Party, which sought to rally the public against the "Islamist" AK Party, as its organizers claimed.
Erdoğan said on Wednesday that everyone should tolerate criticism in democracies and they'd never ignore consistent criticism. "But I would like to remind you that the mindset TÜSIAD adopted is of a bygone era. They used to shape the politics in old Türkiye," Erdoğan said. He also lambasted the opposition for supporting TÜSIAD's statements and said they wouldn't "care about opposition figures acting like servants (of TÜSIAD)."
"In this new Türkiye, you have to know your limits. If you are a business association, you should remain so. You cannot provoke the public and attempt to exert pressure on the judiciary. If you have political ambitions, you can establish a political party or openly side with one of those in the opposition," he said.
The president stated that TÜSIAD was irked at Türkiye's steps for developments. "They want Türkiye to give up local production and be a weak market for global trade. We won't let this happen," he said.
Erdoğan said the business association was apparently disappointed as they cannot "share the wealth of state as they used to do."
"The system they enriched themselves, the system where they shaped politics collapsed," he added.
