TEHRAN, Iran — For the past 35 years, political and economic development in Iran and Turkey have experienced a virtually inverse relationship. As one country has seen improvement, the other has gone into decline. In the 1980s, Turgut Ozal developed Turkey’s economy while Iran was fighting a devastating eight-year war with Iraq. Then, with the end of Ozal's era, successive unstable administrations came to dominate Turkish politics during the 1990s. Meanwhile, Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami improved Iran’s economy. The Iranian inflation rate, which topped 29% in 1998, had dropped to 13% by 2005.
Similarly, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s eight-year rule, which began in 2005, coincided with the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) rise to power in Turkey. Incumbent Turkish President and former Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan lowered Turkey’s inflation rate from 70% in 2001 to 7.4% in 2013. During the same period, under Ahmadinejad, Iran’s inflation inversely experienced an increase to 43%.
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Firooz Dowlatabadi, Iran's former ambassador to Turkey, said he believes there is a relation between these concurrent developments. Dowlatabadi told Al-Monitor, “When studying the history of relations between these two countries, we can see numerous examples of such influences. After the victory of the [1979] Islamic Revolution in Iran, Islamist movements started to flourish in Turkey. When Khatami won the presidential elections and the Reformists gained power in Iran, it had an impact on the Justice and Development Party of Turkey’s electoral victory. These changes did not occur independent of one another, considering the fact that both of these countries play pivotal roles in the region.”
With the advent of the Arab Spring in 2011, differences between Tehran and Ankara increased as they interpreted regional developments very differently. Indeed, the conflict in Syria — which has been extended to Iraq — the emergence of the Islamic State (IS), and the crisis in Yemen have all caused further tension between Tehran and Ankara.
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