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Turkey’s central bank governor Naji Iqbal was removed from office and appointed economist and politician Sahab Kafcioglu, according to a presidential decree released late Friday.
Iqbal, the former finance minister, has served as governor of the central bank since November after being appointed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of the reform of his economic team.
The decision to fire Iqbal comes after he raised the central bank Turkish Thursday the main interest rate at 19 percent.
The central bank said it wanted to tackle inflation, which rose 15.6 percent year-on-year in February.
The Turkish economy, which was mainly fragile before the epidemic crisis, is showing worrying signs with continued inflation and the weakening of the Turkish lira.
Erdogan openly rejects high interest rates, believing that they increase inflation because he believes that they increase inflation, and previously described them as “the mother and father of all evils.” He wants to reduce the annual inflation rate to less than 10 by the end of next year and to 5% by the next elections scheduled for 2023.
Kafcioglu, whose appointment came on Friday night after the financial markets closed, became the fourth governor of the central bank since July 2019.
He is an economist and a former legislator for the ruling party. In February, he wrote an opinion article in the official Yeni Safak newspaper, in which he said that the central bank should not implement the high interest policy because that would lead to more inflation. .
