As of today, every Friday i will be trying to analyse the current economic issues for you at this column named “New Synthesis”.  Even though these articles will be about economics in essence, they will not lack a political perspective.

In other words, they will be articles which do not disregard the political aspect of economics, and which are constructed from the middle of the politics. That is, they will be political economy articles.

Within this framework, in today’s article, i would like to analyse the September unemployment figures reported on Monday  As you know,the unemployment rate is an issue that the government is very proud of lately. Aside from the fact that there has been a debate on the reliability of these figures, the unemployment rate which was over 14% in 2009 had decreased continuously and drawn back to 8% in June of 2012. However from this date on, unemployment rate has started to increase again, and in September it reached up to 9,1%.

The most important thing that the September unemployment figures tell us is that after a long period, the unemployment rate is higher than the same month of the last year; because unemployment rate had been 8,8 % in September of the last year. According to these figures, the number of unemployed has also increased by 141.000 compared to the same period. That is to say, the figures reported lately represent the first sign of deterioration concerning unemployment.

Unlike the disregard of the government, government agencies and various economic circles which do not abstain from praising the government on any occasion, this result was in fact an expected outcome for me, because the growth rate was decreasing. Even the growth targets announced in the government’s middle-term program were lower than 5 %, which has been the performance of Turkish economics in the long term and even these estimates had remained too optimistic compared to the predictions of foreign and international agencies on Turkish economics. After the figures of the third quarter, it has been understood that this year’s growth rate will be around 3 % or even lower.

Now, it is time to wake up from a deep sleep and face the reality. The reality is that even inspite of twisting the figures, unemployment rate in Turkey has started to increase again and it will continue to increase in the following period. Figures of September will go down in history as the first breakage.

 CHP İstanbul deputy Müslim Sarı