Erdoğan's instruction to Mehmet Şimşek before local elections: 'Open the purse strings'

Declaring 2024 the year of the retirees, AKP Chairman and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the additional raise rate expected by millions of SSK and Bağ-Kur retirees as 5 percent.

Retirees, who have been condemned to a starvation wage, were left disappointed.

Gazete Pencere columnist Nuray Babacan wrote that the 42.6 percent raise, which included a 5 percent addition to the salaries of SSK and Bağ-Kur retirees, did not satisfy anyone in Ankara. Babacan claimed that Erdoğan told Şimşek to 'open the purse strings'.

"The announcement of the figures showing the scale of the budget deficit a day earlier was a harbinger that the additional raise would remain 'limited'. The 5 percent increase was decided by finding the average of the alternative proposals from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Labor," said Babacan, who shared the information she obtained from behind-the-scenes sources as follows:

"The problem does not end with just the additional raise for retirees. The ruling party, wanting to emerge from the local elections with an advantage, wants to open the purse strings. Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek and his team, however, are cautious. But President Tayyip Erdoğan and his team do not think the same way. It is said that Erdoğan wants restrictions to be lifted and the 'purse strings to be opened' by March 31, and that he told this directly to Mehmet Şimşek.

In other words, the exact opposite of the warning Şimşek made two weeks ago regarding the proper use of social assistance and the limitation of public spending is being planned."

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