Turkey has a new government. Renewed for five years on May 28 at the head of the country for a third term, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unveiled on Saturday evening a new executive almost completely renovated, in particular in Foreign Affairs and Defense, which calls on an expert to straighten out the economy.
This list is therefore there to reassure the financial markets with the return of Mehmet Simsek. Aged 56, the one whose name has been circulating insistently for several days takes the Ministry of Economy, Erdogan announced after being sworn in in the afternoon in Ankara.
Objective: end the decline in interest rates
Already Minister of Finance (2009-2015) then Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the Economy (until 2018), Mehmet Simsek, former economist of the American bank Merrill Lynch, will have the task of restoring a little orthodoxy in the the country’s financial policy in order to restore investor confidence.
In particular, he must put an end to the policy of downward interest rates defended by the president to encourage production, but which above all caused inflation to soar by 73% on average over the year 2022 and up to 85% last fall.
An intelligence chief at Foreign Affairs
Among the remarkable entrants, Hakan Fidan, former head of MIT, the Turkish intelligence service, takes the helm of Foreign Affairs, replacing Mevlut Cavusoglu. Hakan Fidan, who headed the “services” since May 2010, is a loyal Erdogan, of whom he was already the diplomatic adviser for three years. “He is the keeper of my secrets, the keeper of state secrets”, thus confided in 2012 the president, describing him as a “very well trained civil servant”.
According to a Western diplomatic source, Hakan Fidan has been “his trusted man for years” and also the one who leads negotiations with the Arab world, Egypt, the Emirates, Libya and also Syria with which Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to reconnect through Moscow.
Cevdet Yilmaz named vice-president
Finally, at Defense, Yasar Güler, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, succeeds Hulusi Akar, himself a former chief of staff who has held this position since July 2018. Hulusi Akar was considered the craftsman resistance to the failed putsch of July 2016.
In power for twenty years, first as prime minister, Erdogan has also appointed a new vice-president, Cevdet Yilmaz, a faithful member of his AKP party, deputy for Diyarbakir and already a minister several times. In total, the cabinet, which will meet on Tuesday for the first time, has seventeen ministers.