Turkey's budget has gotten even bigger because of the earthquakes.

Turkey's Finance Ministry said the country's central budget was in a 170.56 billion lira ($8.99 billion) deficit in February. This is due to the huge earthquakes that recently devastated the southeast of the country. Notably, even before the earthquake, President Tayyip Erdogan was already facing serious economic problems such as rising inflation, which is reducing his popularity. The earthquake has only added to his difficulties ahead of the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for May 14.

The government took urgent measures to minimize the impact of the earthquake on the economy, such as postponing debt payments and providing salaries and financial support to earthquake victims.

Economists and business groups predict the Feb. 6 earthquake that killed more than 48,000 people in Turkey will lead to reconstruction costs of about $100 billion and reduce the country's economic growth by one to two percentage points this year.

For January-February, the budget showed a deficit of 202.8 billion liras, with a primary deficit of 147.2 billion liras. According to current data, the budget deficit has already filled 30.8% of the expected total deficit for this year.

Authorities transferred 5.6 billion liras for the costs of transforming disaster-prone areas and allocated some 17.7 billion liras to families and businesses in February. In addition, 16 billion liras was transferred to the state-owned energy company BOTAS in February, making the total amount of transfers this year 32 billion liras.