Faced with Friday’s biggest slump in the lira since last summer, and opinion polls indicating his ruling AK Party might lose its long-held control of the capital, Ankara, in the March 31 municipal ballot, the president is risking market credibility and diplomatic rifts to rally support. “Erdogan’s using every kind of tool available to him to avert the risk of a defeat at the ballot box,” Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, said Monday.
