Reflecting on Recession

Some thoughts on life in modern day Turkey

“My audience – I feel really bad for my audience. I know you’re not a homogenous group of people, but there is one thing that ties you all together, and you know what that is? You’re all people who haven’t been able to emigrate to Europe. Those who have left are far gone by now; you’re all still here. Why are you still here? Is your English really that bad?”

These (loosely translated) lines were delivered by Turkish stand-up comic, Baturay Özdemir, in his 2023 special Biraz Daha (A Little More). The bit was met with riotous laughter and applause – while prosperity may be in short supply, morbid humor is not. The number of young Turks who have relocated to Europe is staggering, though not surprising. One might question whether Turkey’s middle class has truly eroded (as is often quipped), or whether it’s simply moved to London.

Suffice it to say the last few years have not been kind to Turkey, or to Turks.

On inflation, Turkey is Argentina without a World Cup. Annual consumer price increases have been in the double digits since 2018, and close to triple-digits since 2022, fueled in part by a dramatically weakened Turkish lira which has lost 85% of its value against the US dollar in the last five years. Wage hikes - though commonplace - have not kept pace with this decline. Interest rates at 50% since April 2024 have done little to stamp out runaway prices.

One might (naturally) associate economic crises with single watershed events; a “Black Tuesday” that lives on in Wall Street fame, making headlines across the world and forming chapters in school textbooks. An event - with a start and a finish - that can be neatly categorized and studied. Unique to Turkey’s situation is the impressive longevity of the crisis - if purchasing power was pushed off a cliff, it was also given a small parachute. The drop in economic prosperity has been precipitous enough to create an entrenched social malaise, but not dramatic enough to cause mass social unrest. The jury is out on which is worse.

A new generation of young Turks (the demographic, not the political movement) have grown up in the shadow of a looming and unwelcome guest. “Guess how much I paid for dinner last night” has become water-cooler chat. “You won’t believe how much that car costs” is a good ice-breaker. A fun game to play at restaurants is peeling away the stickers on menus to reveal what prices were last year - often half what they are today.

The ubiquitous nature of the crisis, woven at this point into the social fabric of modern day Turkey, may also account for what can only be described as a profound societal resilience to phenomena that might otherwise break a nation in half. Comedians like Özdemir owe their ascent in large part to the collective understanding that hard times will eventually pass, and while dark humor certainly can’t bring down inflation rates, it can offer some psychological respite. For Turkey, a country that has perennially looked like one bad finance minister away from total disaster, the arc of the financial universe is long, but it bends towards a place just short of chaos.

---