PM Modi Congratulates Tayyip Erdogan For Winning Turkiye Presidential Polls

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday congratulated Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning Turkiye presidential elections for the fifth term. Taking to Twitter, PM Modi said that he was confident that India-Turkiye bilateral relations and cooperation on global issues will continue to grow in coming times.

Other global leaders including United States President Joe Biden and top diplomat Antony Blinken, Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy among others greeted Erdogan on his run-off victory.

“Congratulations @RTErdogan on re-election as the President of Türkiye! I am confident that our bilateral ties and cooperation on global issues will continue to grow in the coming times,” the tweet read.

While the win gives Erdogan a reason to celebrate, there is a list of challenges ahead of him to manage in Turkiye.

From a crippling economic crisis to a diplomatic standoff with allies, there’s a lot awaiting Erdogan. The cost-of-living crisis has eroded Turks’ purchasing power, with annual inflation running at around 40 per cent in April after it touched 85 percent last year, reported NDTV citing AFP.

Erdogan’s unorthodox policy of cutting interest rates in the belief they would lower inflation, has not wielded the results as expected. In February, the central bank justified its last cut of 0.5 percentage points as a way of supporting jobs and industrial production.

As per the report, the policy rate Turkiye set for banks is now far below that at which prices are rising. This essentially means that people are losing money if they leave it unspent in their accounts.

Turkiye’s currency lira has lost more than half of its value in two years and on Friday briefly traded at 20 liras to the dollar for the first time.