Turkey: damned either way

published 14 April 2017

On Sunday 16 April, Turkey is holding a referendum on whether its increasingly authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdogan should be granted even more power. The ballot paper proposes the abolition of the office of prime minister, while Erdogan would also be able to appoint half of the most senior judges and extend his influence over parliament.

"Investors are struggling to see much upside" whether the measures pass or not, say Tugce Ozsoy and Constantine Courcoulas on Bloomberg.com. The polls are on a knife edge. Some reckon there could be a short relief rally simply because an issue that has dogged markets for some time will have disappeared.

But it won't last. The economy has struggled. Erdogan has continually tried to bully the central bank into cutting interest rates, even though higher rates have been required to squeeze out inflation caused by the plummeting lira. The plunging currency was a result of his own erratic behaviour. Now a "Yes" vote will cement the impression of Turkey turning into Russia, while a "No" could see further instability as Erdogan refuses to give up, creating more political uncertainty.

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Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.