Turkey’s President and Chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan implied during a rally in Isparta on Sunday that the low value of the Turkish lira against the US dollar was a foreign conspiracy intended to stop him.
“You can’t hit us with foreign exchange rates. You can’t hit us with such manipulation,” he said.
“We are number one in the world with 7.4 percent economic growth,” Erdoğan told the crowd while criticizing his rivals in the upcoming presidential election for their complaints about the Turkish lira’s significant loss in value against foreign currencies, claiming it indicated a sign of poor economic management.
On Saturday in Erzurum, the agenda was also about the Turkish lira’s free fall, with Erdoğan asking the Turkish public to exchange their foreign currency savings for lira.
Another subject Erdoğan touched upon was construction projects, such as the third İstanbul airport and a famous canal that will be dug on the western side of İstanbul and will connect the Marmara and Black seas. He again attacked his rivals for remarks that undermined the importance of the projects.
“From Africa to Syria hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters are relating these successes as their own success story,” Erdoğan explained, since according to him the construction projects had inspired all Muslim countries.
Erdoğan also argued that Turkey would top the list of the world’s most charitable countries if its efforts were assessed in proportion to its gross domestic product.
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in 2017 claimed that Turkey was just behind the US in the list of most charitable countries since the US had spent $6.3 billion on humanitarian aid and Turkey had spent $6 million.
According to the 2017 World Giving Index, published by the Charities Aid Foundation using Gallup data, the most charitable countries in the world were Myanmar, Indonesia and Kenya; however, Turkey has not been included on the index since 2015.
Turkey had been in 128th place in 2014.