According to the local press, several men died after buying counterfeit alcohol in a Turkmen restaurant in the city, 30 Turkish liras (0.80 euros) for 50 cl.
In comparison, raki, a traditional aniseed alcohol, costs no less than 1,300 pounds (35 euros) per liter in the supermarket, in a country where the minimum wage is 600 euros. This price and those of other alcoholic beverages, higher on average in Turkey – a country with a Muslim majority – than in the European Union, fuel clandestine production.
“We lose at least 500 people a year to counterfeit alcohol. It’s a massacre, a mass killing, and these are deaths caused by taxes! », protested Wednesday in the Turkish parliament Mustafa Adigüzel, deputy of the CHP (social democrat).
“We must remedy the exorbitant price of alcohol,” insisted the elected official of the main opposition party to the Islamo-conservative government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a pious Muslim opposed to the consumption of alcohol.
“Nearly 70% of a bottle is made up of taxes”
Çagin Tan Eroglu, co-coordinator of an association monitoring public policies on alcohol, lists the only deaths reported by the press, but affirms that “their number is growing” under the effect of increases in alcohol taxes. alcohol, which take place every semester.
48 people died from adulterated alcohol poisoning in 2024 in Istanbul, according to the local governorate. Contacted by AFP, the Turkish Ministry of Health did not provide a national figure.
“Taxes allow the government to collect easy money while politically punishing a certain way of life,” accuses Çagin Tan Eroglu. “But people are dying because of these irresponsible and overtly ideological policies.”
The amount of the raki tax, introduced after President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, has jumped more than 2,500% since 2010 – a spectacular increase that the very high inflation is not enough to explain -, causing the price of drink to rise faster than wages.
-“Nearly 70% of a bottle is made up of taxes. Such a practice does not exist in any other country,” Özgür Aybas, president of the alcohol dealers association, told AFP, for whom the situation is such in Turkey that “today, even in restaurants the most luxurious, adulterated alcohol may be served.”
“The government’s bad policy is entirely responsible for the deaths of citizens,” he asserts, judging that alcohol consumers “are treated like second-class citizens.”
Form a “healthy generation”
However, the rise in prices of alcoholic beverages is painless for the majority of Turks.
Although alcohol is more widespread in Turkey than in most Muslim-majority countries, only 12.1% of Turks say they consume it, with a marked difference between men (18.4%) and women (5.9%). , according to the Turkish Statistics Institute.
The government has not reacted publicly to the current wave of adulterated alcohol poisonings in Istanbul, despite media hype and warnings from several European chancelleries to their citizens traveling to Turkey.
“We are constantly increasing the price of alcohol and cigarettes […] but they do not stop consuming it,” said President Erdogan in 2022, who worked to promote ayran, made from yogurt, as a national drink instead of raki in order to form a “ healthy generation.
This discourse, and the regular denunciation of “drunkards”, “has only exacerbated the socio-cultural and political divisions which beset Turkey”, notes historian Emine Evered, author of a recent work on alcohol in Turkey. since the Ottoman Empire.
