CHP calls on PM to defend Deputy PM Babacan, charged with ‘treason’ by president

ANKARA

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Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu must not remain silent after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan charged a leading member of his cabinet with “treason,” main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) Deputy Parliamentary Group Chair Akif Hamzaçebi said on March 2.

Erdoğan’s increasingly aggressive salvoes against the Central Bank and its governor, Erdem Başçı, last week included claims that all those against low interest rates are guilty of “treason” against Turkey.

“Following where the matters are heading to, [Erdoğan] has put Babacan on this train of traitors too,” Hamzaçebi said, adding that Erdoğan has been “accusing Babacan, who has so far tried to do his job appropriately, of treason.”

In a speech on Feb. 27, after the Central Bank failed to meet his demand for bigger interest rate cuts, Erdoğan did not touch on the Bank’s latest rate decision, but repeated his view that high interest rates amounted to a “betrayal of the nation.”

“Selling out the country would be to waste its resources through mismanagement, high interest rates and high inflation,” he said in a speech ostensibly about Syria and the Kurdish peace process, during which he listed various forms of “betrayal.”

Hamzaçebi said Davutoğlu must not remain silent in the face of such rhetoric.

“Davutoğlu is watching these. I wonder if he is not the prime minister? Mr. Davutoğlu, you cannot evade this by keeping silent. You have to take a stance. The president is either telling the truth or not.
If the president is speaking the truth, then you should immediately dismiss the deputy prime minister and the Central Bank governor. But if he is speaking wrongly, then you should defend your deputy prime minister and the Central Bank governor,” he said.