Turkish future is black

When Berat Albayrak was asked earlier this year about his relationship with his father-in-law, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the young finance minister was gushing. Their bond was not about politics, he told the state broadcaster TRT, adding: “The relationship is about an ideal, about soul.” Six months later, after his shock resignation on November 8, that relationship — and Albayrak’s political career — appears to have gone up in flames. Like his friend Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and senior adviser of Donald Trump, who will soon be forced to leave the White House, the 42-year-old now finds himself out of a job.

The abrupt departure of the second most powerful man in the Turkish government has triggered a shake-up in the country’s economic management after months of mounting alarm about a plunge in the lira and plummeting foreign currency reserves. It has also stunned Turkey’s political elite, many of whom believed that Erdogan was grooming his influential and widely resented son-in-law as his political heir in the Justice and Development Party (AKP). “If you were a [ruling party] member of parliament, Berat represented the ultimate power. He was alpha and omega,” says a former AKP MP. “Now he doesn’t exist . . . It’s over.”

Albayrak’s stratospheric rise — and dramatic fall — is as much a story about how Turkey has changed under Erdogan’s watch as it is about the man himself. “It’s very emblematic of an authoritarian country,” says Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born professor at MIT and co-author of Why Nations Fail. “Because of his father-in-law’s position, he was able to be very influential and build a team around him that acted autonomously and very destructively. Those are things that you shouldn’t have in functioning democracies.”