[PEN-L:29500] Kemal Dervis: A social democrat with free market instincts

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Economist article below is another good example of
"psuedo-reality simulation". However, since all "reality" in
Turkey is simulated, I see no harm in sending it. It may be of
interest to those of you who are following the developments in
the proximity of Iraq. Dervis decided to go with the Republican
Peoples Party metioned below, most likely after this article was
written, so there is no mention of it there.

Best,
Sabri

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http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1288969

Charlemagne

The man Turks trust: Kemal Dervis

Aug 15th 2002
>From The Economist print edition


Their economy needs a firm hand. His has been that. Will they be
able to vote for it to be so again?

Get article background

"IT WAS very important to me to be top of the class, so that I
would be chosen to carry the Turkish flag at the end of the
week," reminisces Turkey's freshly resigned former economy
minister about his primary-school years on bucolic Buyukada
island, in the sea of Marmara near Istanbul. Today, Kemal Dervis
says his most cherished goal is to "establish a convergence of
centre-left forces that would achieve the conditions under which
Turkey can overcome its economic difficulties and pursue our road
towards Europe and a modern and free society".

Since announcing his departure from Bulent Ecevit's government
last week, Turkey's most popular pro-secular public figure?he
hates to be called a politician?has been seeking to do just that.
Technocrat though he was and is, with no experience of
down-to-earth electoral politics, he has been urging trade-union
leaders and minor leftish politicians to forget their differences
and unite (with him, though that is not how he puts it) against
the likely victor of the general election on November 3rd: Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, an ex-mayor of Istanbul, whose enemies call him,
over his fierce denials, an Islamist.

It will be a surprise if Mr Dervis can unite the left. It is a
shambles. Mr Ecevit supposedly is part of it. But when his
ill-health sparked the collapse of his left-right coalition, and
now an early election, the most prominent of eight ministers who
quit, Ismail Cem, broke away from Mr Ecevit's Democratic Left to
form his own New Turkey Party. Then there is the Republican
People's Party, founded by Ataturk and now run by prickly Deniz
Baykal. He sees only one fit leader for the left, himself.

Many modern-minded Turks would like to see Mr Dervis as prime
minister. Certainly he is fit for that. He was recruited to the
economy ministry from the World Bank in Washington 18 months ago
to pull Turkey out of a financial abyss. He negotiated a gigantic
bail-out package from the IMF and the World Bank, with a
programme of fiscal and economic reform. For the first time, the
central bank became truly independent. Money no longer grows by
the trillion lira on printing presses. Politicians can no longer
dip into state banks to fund their election campaigns. Much else
has been begun, and all against tireless obstruction from some of
Mr Ecevit's coalition partners. Deny it as he may, Mr Dervis is
no infant in the art of political manoeuvre.

His real achievement, he says, was to sell the programme to the
Turkish people. "By working closely with civil society, by making
friends in the labour movement, we got people to see that it was
in their interest." The crisis was overcome?at a cost, he admits,
that has hit the poor before the benefits turn up.

That is why the economy and Turkey's hoped-for membership of the
European Union, not the supposed dangers posed by Islamic
radicals and separatist Kurds, are set to be the main electoral
issues. In the wrong hands, says Mr Dervis, meaning Mr Erdogan's,
the economy could unravel again. It is also why some Turks and
many foreign governments fancy him to lead Turkey.

But he has another quality. Scion though he is of a line of
distinguished Ottoman pashas, he stands out among the politicians
for being both modest and honest. And he insists that he has been
a "social democrat all my life. I believe that humankind is one
large family and while I'm fond of Turkey and patriotic, I've
also always believed in the principles of the international
social-democratic movement."

Mr Dervis's free-market instincts may have come from his business
tycoon father; but his progressive ones he perhaps owes to his
half-German, half-Dutch mother, who fled Hitler's Germany in
disgust for a town in central Anatolia, where she taught English.
And his skills in public finance? Well, one of his ancestors was
instructed by the then Sultan Abdul Hamid I in the late 18th
century to fix the already ailing Ottoman empire's finances. Like
Mr Dervis, he did the job well. But the hapless pasha was
decapitated, his severed head being duly placed in a gourd full
of honey and exposed at the Topkapi palace in Istanbul, after he
was implicated in a plot to overthrow the sultan.

Will he join the party?

Mr Dervis escaped that fate at the hands of Mr Ecevit. But he
still avers that he is an economist, not a politician, and would
rather be economy minister again in a government "where the
centre-left has sufficient weight". Which is very noble, but has
not stopped him being courted by one political party after
another. And for all his reputation, politically speaking he has
to run for election. But with which party? Until he made up his
mind this week, the best guess was Mr Cem's. But Mr Dervis
dilly-dallied over any decision. Wimping out, his critics
claimed. They were wrong: Mr Dervis feared that if he chose one
party over others, rather than uniting the left he would split it
even further, and in so doing assure Mr Erdogan of victory. This
week, he had to admit temporary defeat: Mr Cem's party said it
would fight the election on its own. Mr Dervis pledged to go on
trying, but said he would not join Mr Cem, and in contrast
praised Mr Baykal, who had promptly claimed to be ready for
unity.

So now? If the left still will not pull itself together, Mr
Dervis may yet, as he hinted earlier, retreat to academe. That
would be a waste. He is popular enough, unlike Turkey's tired old
cast of politicians, to launch a serious challenge to the
charismatic Mr Erdogan. But, for Turkey, the real challenges will
come after the election. "For all the economic problems, I
believe the people will go where there is the greatest
constructive realism and support those who have realistic
long-term solutions," says Mr Dervis. That belief may prove right
or wrong, but they'd for sure be wise to. Turkey has lurched
through fiscal chaos and wild inflation (1.64m liras, yes, that's
millions, to the dollar) for far too long. It can become open and
democratic?the current criteria?beyond the EU's insistence, nay
its dreams, but is that the sort of economy you'd invite into a
sober economic and monetary union?