Erdoğan announces: Will there be a 'flat-rate raise' for retirees?

President and AKP Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke at his party's rally in Kütahya.

In response to the demands of retirees for a flat-rate raise and for the lowest retirement pension to be equal to the minimum wage, Erdoğan stated the following:

"Retirees are among the segments most affected. Although we have raised retirement pensions to levels incomparable to the periods before us, our heart desires for our citizens to maintain their lives under better conditions.

"IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO COVER THE EXPENSE"

Some people come out and try to provoke our retirees with their own logic by saying let's add 10,000 liras or 7,000 liras to retirement pensions as a flat-rate increase. We have 16 million retirees. Adding 7,000 liras to retirement pensions means adding 1.4 trillion liras from the budget. It means transferring a resource of 1.9 trillion liras here. I am not talking about the amount of current pensions. I am explaining the cost of the additional increase expressed only as 7,000 liras or 10,000 liras.

Even if we did not drive a single nail in our country throughout 2024 and transferred the entire investment budget here, it would not be enough to cover this expense. Likewise, even if we used all earthquake expenditures for this purpose, it would still not be enough. Even if we transferred the entire budget of education and health without spending a single penny on them, it would barely cover it or not cover it at all. If we did not pay the salaries of more than half of the state's employees—including soldiers, police, educators, healthcare workers, and all other workers and civil servants—then perhaps we could cover this additional expense. What we are talking about here is not the cost of our retirees' current pensions, but the amount of the additional increases requested. We are also aware of the injustice that flat-rate increases cause among retirement pensions."