Six days before the elections in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has approved a hefty salary increase for 700,000 public sector workers. Salaries would be increased by 45 percent, he announced on Tuesday. The increase is expected to take effect immediately after the presidential and parliamentary elections in June. The minimum wage in the public sector thus rises to 15,000 lira (just under 700 euros). Pensions for veterans and relatives of terror victims are also to be increased by ten percent. The measures are presumably aimed at the still undecided voters, who could tip the scales in the tight race.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan based in Ankara.

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High inflation and the decline in the value of the lira are the main reasons why the president has to fear for his re-election next Sunday. Experts blame Erdogan's interference in the central bank's interest rate policy. For partly religious reasons, he advocates the idiosyncratic theory that inflation is best fought with low interest rates. Erdogan defended his financial policy on Tuesday. He spoke of "attacks that were directed at our economy." Behind this is the long-held claim that the United States is waging an economic war against Turkey to get rid of Erdogan. The president announced further inflation-compensating benefits for July, without giving details.

Turkey denies entry to two election observers

Shortly before the arrival of the election observers of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), it was also announced that the Turkish government had denied entry to two mission participants. Danish MP Søren Sondergaard said he was turned away for visiting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Syria in the past. Turkey accuses the SDF of links to the PKK terrorist group. According to media reports, the second election observer affected by the travel ban is the Swedish Social Democrat Kadir Kasirga.

The head of the mission, FDP MP Michael Link, accused Turkey of influencing the composition of the mission. It is particularly problematic that the entry bans were justified with statements "that both made as elected parliamentarians with the right to freedom of expression," he told the F.A.Z. The Federal Government's Transatlantic Coordinator has been appointed by the OSCE as Special Coordinator for the Monitoring Missions in Turkey. One of its tasks is to compile the assessments of the long-term observers and the parliamentary assemblies of the OSCE and the Council of Europe into a joint report in order to prevent differences in judgments from being politically instrumentalised.

Meanwhile, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Turkey to pay €12,000 in compensation for an unjustified fine for Amnesty International, triggered by an administrative fine imposed on the Turkish section of the organisation in 2008. The Turkish authorities accused the Amnesty branch of declaring money received from abroad too late. The trial was not fair, the Strasbourg judges ruled.