Turkey’s central bank, under new leadership, nearly doubled interest rates on Thursday in a hotly-anticipated decision for EM watchers.

I should note immediately that CBT isn’t actually under new leadership. Turkey is an autocracy, which means every important decision has to be cleared with Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That’s especially true when it comes to rate decisions. Erdogan is the self-described “enemy of interest rates,” which means anyone who raises rates is conspiring with an enemy of Erdogan’s. That’s a very bad idea if you reside inside Turkey.

This is farce — a tragicomedy, and a tale so familiar that it scarcely needs retelling. Anyone with even a passing interest in Turkey can recite it from memory. Given that, I won’t regale readers with a decade of history. Suffice to say Erdogan won reelection last month, and one of his first initiatives involved reshuffling his economic team. He brought Mehmet Simsek back and installed Hafize Gaye Erkan, a little-known veteran of Goldman and First Republic, at the helm of the central bank.

There’s no use skirting the issue. Until proven otherwise, the assumption is (or should be, anyway) that Erdogan is merely pretending to care about economic and policy orthodoxy and that he’ll stop pretending at some point in the relatively near future. For now, though, he’s allowing Simsek and Erkan to nod in the direction of policy normalization.

Thursday’s rate hike from Erkan was 650bps. It’s not an exaggeration to say that such a move, were it not cleared with Erdogan down to the very last detail, would be cause for immediate dismissal — or something worse — for any central bank governor brave enough to chance it. So, you can be absolutely sure that Erdogan was fully briefed on this decision long before it was released.

Implied real rates in Turkey are now -25%. YoY headline inflation receded to “just” 39.5% last month, according to the latest data.

Markets expected an outsized hike. Erkan plainly had a green light to pursue at least one major adjustment. “The Committee decided to begin the monetary tightening process in order to establish the disinflation course as soon as possible, to anchor inflation expectations and to control the deterioration in pricing behavior,” she said Thursday.

The June statement sounded quite a bit like a “normal” policy statement from a central bank operating on something akin to orthodoxy, and it made mention of “sticky” services inflation and the likelihood that the situation will require persistence from CBT.

“The Committee will determine the policy rate in a way that will create monetary and financial conditions necessary to ensure a decline in the underlying trend of inflation and to reach the 5% inflation target in the medium term,” Erkan went on, adding that “monetary tightening will be further strengthened as much as needed in a timely and gradual manner until a significant improvement in the inflation outlook is achieved.”

Her repeated references to a “gradual” process were consistent with recent remarks from Simsek who, in discussions with bankers and business people, indicated the shift to normal will be slow and deliberate so as to prevent chaotic outcomes. Earlier this month, the lira plunged when banks briefly stopped intervening on its behalf.

All gradualism aside, it’s unimaginable to me that Erkan will be allowed to persist in the kind of hawkish forward guidance that accompanied Thursday’s decision. “Strengthened as much as needed” isn’t the sort of policy bent that Erdogan is likely to countenance for long. Further, you can already see Erkan trying to strike an impossible balance. How, for example, can you tighten policy in a manner that’s both “timely” and “gradual”? Those two terms may not be entirely incompatible, but there sure is some tension between them.

A few days ago, Erdogan raised the minimum wage in Turkey by another 34%. That’s not the sort of policy that’s conducive to rapid and sustainable disinflation.