I think that's the trademark of populist governments, but Turkey's government seems to have taken it to the extreme.
No sane populist government will spend taxpayers' money on projects that cannot easily be transferred into votes.
Ideally, government should not stupefy people but illuminate them, and make them see the long term benefits at the cost of short term (apparent) loss and pain.
This is especially risky if the country is not having trade surplus and stashed a mountain of reserves aside. In fact, trade surplus would mean money has been spent wisely, not pet projects that make only a group of elites rich. Very few developing country has the luxury of not having trade surplus. If no trade surplus, then credits (loans) must be spent very very wisely so they could pay themselves back, not leading into a debt/interest payment trap.
I think, being on the Western camp, Turkey had a good chances for credit-based growth (and probably did that in the past), but now the credits seem to have been spent very unwisely and led to corruption and no return on investment. Add to that a very fragile foreign policy situation. Plus a very fragile global economy in which almost everybody at each other's throat.
I wonder if the current government had not sold all the national assets, privatized large SOEs, led foreign interests take over more than half of the baking system, ports, telecommunications etc (of course, for a payment), what would be Turkey's current account deficit with this level of unwise and short-sighted plunder of money.
