Retirement Increase Election Adjustment

Aiming to give retirees a raise and win their votes before the election, AKP unknowingly prepared a bill to pay for the raise in May, but right after the election. If the law in its current form had been passed by Parliament and signed into law, elections would have been held on May 14 and retirees would have started receiving their salary increases from May 17. In other words, all the calculations done to get votes from retirees would be wasted.

REBUILT OFFER

However, the error was noticed while the bill was being discussed in the Planning and Budget Committee of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The AKP deputies corrected the mistake with a motion they tabled at midnight, and the bill was revised so that the first salary increase is paid in April, that is, before the elections.

With the mini-election package, which is expected to be discussed in the General Assembly of the Turkish Grand National Assembly in the coming days, the minimum pension will be increased from 5,500 liras to 7,500 liras. In addition, the pensioner’s vacation bonus, which is 1,100 TL, will be increased to 2,000 TL. Defending the bill in the commission, AKP Group Vice President Mustafa Elitaş announced that the annual cost of the increase to the lowest pension will be TL 121 billion, and the cost to come this year will be TL 84 thousand. million TL.

This explanation was confusing. When the annual cost is divided by 12 months, the monthly cost is calculated to be approximately 10 billion lira. With this calculation, the cost of 84 billion in 2023 revealed that the salary increase will be paid for about 8 months, that is, the salary increase will be paid in May, not April.

The pensions of public officials are paid on the first 4 days of each month, and the pensions of the other retirees, who constitute the majority, are paid on different days from the 17th to the 28th of each month. Since the elections will be on May 14, in this case, most of the retired civil servants would not have received the increase while they collected the salary increase and went to vote.

Realizing the mistake, the AKP deputies changed the current article of the bill with a motion. This article, which was arranged as ‘This law comes into force on the date of its publication’ when it first came to parliament, has been changed to ‘Comes into force on the date of its publication to be implemented from the April payment period of 2023’. In this way, the payment of salary increases was guaranteed before the election, and a possible problem that could arise in public officials retired due to delay was eliminated.

THE ELECTION PACKAGE INCREASED TO 150.5 BILLION

With another proposal approved at midnight, the pension of retired village guards was increased to 7,500 lira. It was announced that this proposal would impose an additional cost of 1.2 billion lire to the budget. Thus, the size of the electoral mini-package, which was initially 149.3 billion lire, increased to 150.5 billion lire. Under the proposal, the pensions of security guards who turned 15 and retired, which are still between 4,184 and 5,197 lira, will now rise along with the other lower pensions. With the regulation there will be an increase in the pensions of 42 thousand 750 people.