No IMF in Turkey’s future: Erdoğan

ANKARA

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will never have a role in the future of the Turkish economy, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said, also criticizing the main opposition party on the issue.

“When we came to power [in 2002], Turkey’s debts stood at $23.5 billion,” Erdoğan said Feb. 21 at a local election rally in the western province of Denizli.

“I told the IMF chair in Davos [at the time] ‘You are not the prime minister of Turkey, I am. You do not have a job to run Turkey, take your money and leave the rest.’ He was sent away [as the IMF chair], your brother here became the president. Now we have no debts to the IMF,” Erdoğan said, claiming that main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu would not have such a stance if he was in power.

“Now, Mr. Kemal says we would apply to the IMF. This is what he would do,” Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan also claimed that the strategy and candidates of the opposition alliance for the March 31 local elections have been shaped by FETÖ and the PKK.

“A quadruple gang was put up against the People’s Alliance. It’s remotely controlled by Qandil and Pennsylvania,” Erdoğan said.

Qandil is a mountain in northern Iraq where the central headquarters and training camps of the illegal PKK, a group listed as terrorist by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU, are situated. Pennsylvania is the U.S. state where FETÖ leader Fethullah Gülen and his top aides live.

“Their election strategies as well as candidate lists have been imposed by Pennsylvania and terror barons,” he added.

Turkey will go to local elections on March 31 in two major political alliances, the People’s Alliance made by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Nation Alliance by the CHP and the İYİ (Good) Party.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) announced it won’t present candidates in 11 provinces, in a move interpreted as an indirect support to the Nation Alliance.

The “quadruple gang,” according to Erdoğan, is composed of the CHP, the İYİ Party, the HDP and the Felicity Party (SP). “A new political game against us is being staged. It’s about political engineering,” he said.

“The spokesmen of the HDP openly indicated that their strategy was based on efforts to let the People’s Alliance lose elections,” Erdoğan said, adding that “the representatives of this organization openly say they will stand against the AKP, but the leader of the CHP seems not disturbed by this. He never says ‘We don’t need the support of the terrorists.’”

CHP chair Kılıçdardoğlu has “preferred to align with the terrorists and the political leg of the terrorists,” the president said.

“I call on my people who support the CHP from the heart: Are you still going to vote for this man? Just think twice. You have to teach him a good lesson.”