Turkey’s president cannot defy reality for long

MEN TEND to grow stubborn with age, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan was hardly pliable to start with. During 19 years in power in Turkey, first as prime minister and then as president, he has thousands of dissidents and critics: secular military officers, protesters, Kurdish activists, members of the Gulen religious movement. He has silenced or purged civil-society groups, the independent media and the judiciary. With every challenge that he survives—the Gezi Park protests of 2013, an attempted coup in 2016—his ego has grown. Sensible advisers have quit, leaving him surrounded by relatives and yes-men.A leader as powerful as Mr Erdogan can silence voices he does not wish to hear. But he cannot wish away the reality they describe. Since September, he has been trying to defy the laws of economics, over which he has no veto. As some emerging economies raised interest rates to fight inflation, Turkey . Despite inflation topping 21% in November, its president pressed the central bank to cut interest rates by five percentage points, to 14%, in keeping with his rather than fight it. In response, Turks switched more deposits out of lira into dollars and euros. That fuelled a : the lira fell from eight to the dollar in August to 18 in late December.