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Comment by m_a_g | Hacker News Reader

Turkey has been a democracy for almost a century now.

However, it all comes down to this, what happens when people of a democratic country elect a president that has totalitarian tendencies?

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This happens all the time, and the criticisms are, in my mind, directed at policy as much as anything about the people having “totalitarian tendencies.” In Muslim countries, in particular, like Turkey and Egypt, totalitarianism is usually invoked to keep out proponents of political Islam. Erdogan was replacing authoritarians who maintained Turkey’s secular regime against a religious populace. When Egypt’s dictator fell, the people replaced him with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then a military dictator toppled him to restore secularism.

On the paper, Turkiye is a democracy. In reality, since 1950's it was not. It is a dictatorship or oligarchy at best, funded by the big money of the world, mostly from the US. Rigged elections, placing puppet governments (like Tayyip) is an ongoing theme. At the time of election, people are given the impression of who they are electing as it is in a democracy, while the result is already known by the powers that be. Other than few military takeovers of the country since 1960, this country have never had fair and clear elections. Hence, Tayyip's puppet government has ben brought to action by the same powers that be, to decimate the Turkish armed forces, so, no more of those nasty military take-over actions can be repeated. Turkiye has turned into a Banana republic for what it is worth.

If Turkey is a puppet, who's holding the strings?

What does their export market and foreign currency reserves tell you? (I don't know myself, just suggesting the points of leverage.)

FX reserves tell us whatever every country's FX tell us. That countries have forex, gold and bond reserves to protect the value of their currency. It can also work in the opposite direction. India and US keep large sums of gold. Greece kept large sums of US govt. bonds (until 2008 market crash at which point they found out this was a bad idea).

Japan's Abe is famous for auctioning huge reserves of JPY in order to reduce the value of their currency and stock up on USD. Reduced currency value means their exports became temporarily cheaper and this way they got an artificial boost to their production industry.

This is a complex subject and doesn't show that "country X is the puppet of country Y", it rather shows how they like to strategize for their own benefit.

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