Who Is Afraid of the “Finance Lobby”? Neoliberal Transformation of Turkey’s Economic Management

The passage to the presidential system of government (PSG) on 9 July 2018 in Turkey, following a two-year-long emergency rule, has meant a leap in the state’s neoliberal transformation since the 1980s. In the economic field, this led to the rise of politicised, centralised, personalised, discretionary, and non-accountable management practices in contrast to the earlier neoliberal mottoes of depoliticization, decentralisation, institutionalisation, rule of law, and transparency. This presentation provides a detailed analysis of economic management in Turkey in the first four months of the PSG, a period which also saw Turkey’s most severe financial crisis since the one in 2001, to highlight the political economic continuities underlying this shift towards re-politicization.