Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan takes drastic action against a campaign critical of the government.
You can no longer ask for the number 128.
Istanbul / Ankara - Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacts thinly to a campaign by the opposition party CHP.
This was "a lie and wrong from beginning to end," said the Turkish President on Wednesday at a parliamentary group meeting in parliament in Ankara.
What makes Erdogan so enraged is a simple question that is asked on posters, some of which are as big as a house: "Where are the 128 billion?" .
Campaign against Erdogan: where has 128 billion dollars gone?
The campaign refers to the Turkish central bank's foreign exchange reserves of 128 billion dollars, which the CHP believes have disappeared during the tenure of former finance minister Berat Albayrak.
The only thing that is spicy is not the amount of money that has allegedly disappeared, but also the person Albayrak.
Because this is Erdogan's son-in-law.
Erdogan takes the whole thing personally.
“Nothing is lost,” he said in March, describing the CHP campaign as an attack on his family.
The money “neither fizzled out nor ended up unfairly and unjustly in someone's pocket”, but was spent, for example, to fight the corona pandemic and to meet the demand for foreign currency.
Campaign against Erdogan: complaints filed against those responsible
The government is also taking action against those responsible for the campaign.
A complaint was filed against them with allegations of insulting the president.
The posters themselves disappeared from the public in Istanbul, they were taken down, according to the CHP.
Members of the opposition party criticized the police for not only using cranes, but also with armored cars.
The opposition did not surrender.
When the mention of the number 128 was banned, she put up posters with the question, “And where did half of 256 go?”.
But these, too, were soon torn down.
Erdogan is also currently under pressure because the rate of the Turkish lira is slipping sharply. The reason is that he fired the central bank chief Naci Agbal after he had raised the key interest rate. Agbal's dismissal is the third change in leadership at the top of the central bank in the past two years.