It seems obvious what Recep Tayyip Erdogan needs to do to pull Turkey out of the currency crisis that could sink its economy. Yet as the lira tanks and President Erdogan rages against a looming disaster that is in good part self-inflicted, his reluctance to do what is required is equally obvious — unless he thinks he might lose his unassailable political hold on Turkey in any economic meltdown.
Re-elected president in June with new powers that swept away the checks and balances of Turkey’s parliamentary system, Mr Erdogan rules a nation split down the middle.
On one side, the conservative masses of Turkey’s Anatolian heartland to whom he and his neo-Islamist ruling party have given voice. These people had been marginalised as pious backwoodsmen by the other side, the secular elites who ran the country as their inalienable inheritance from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic almost a century ago. His followers always say Mr Erdogan was the first to include them — and give them dignity and identity. But his ability to provide for them — and his network of cronies — is now in peril.