After a long delay, Ankara has finally released its new medium-term economic program, a road map of fundamental economic policies and projections that was supposed to be completed in May. Named the “New Economic Program,” the three-year plan was unveiled Sept. 20 by Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak, who is also President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law.

The program had been eagerly anticipated in the hope it would outline the prospect of a new “story” of success for Turkey and stimulate much-needed foreign investments. Government officials had claimed the gloom in the Turkish economy — some already call it a crisis — would dissipate once the program was announced. In a TV interview Aug. 3, Albayrak raised expectations, promising “a transformation unlike other medium-term programs in the past.”

How Ankara would diagnose the current bottleneck was of special interest to economic actors, given Erdogan’s harsh objections to defining the downturn as a “crisis.” The program highlights mostly “external factors” to explain the problems. It refers to the mass anti-government protests in the summer of 2013, “the judicial coup” in December 2013 — large-scale corruption probes that implicated government members among others before being thwarted by Ankara — and the 2016 botched coup attempt as having had “negative effects” on the economy, even though “political stability was strengthened and the healthy functioning of democracy was guaranteed” in the four elections held in the meantime.

According to the program, the risks stemming from Syria, the US Federal Reserve’s rate hikes and especially “the US administration’s direct targeting of the Turkish economy and the Turkish lira” curbed capital flows to Turkey and pushed up the country’s risk premium, resulting in sharp increases in interest and foreign exchange rates.