Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has dominated Turkish politics since 2003, as prime minister until 2014 and as president since, remaking the country's constitution around his own office. Born in Istanbul in 1954 and raised partly in Rize on the Black Sea, he sold lemonade and sesame rolls as a boy, played semi-professional football, and studied at an imam hatip religious school and then a business faculty. He rose through the Islamist Welfare Party and was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, where he was widely credited with fixing water supply, waste collection and public transport in a chaotic city. In 1998 he was banned from politics and jailed for four months for reciting a poem the courts held to be religious incitement. He founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001 with a moderate, EU-oriented platform, and it won in 2002. His first decade brought rapid growth, IMF debt repaid, hospitals, roads and airports built, EU accession talks opened in 2005, and the political power of the army broken — partly through the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials, later shown to rest on fabricated evidence. The turn came after 2013. The Gezi Park protests were suppressed, a corruption investigation reaching his family was shut down and prosecutors purged, and his alliance with the Gülen movement collapsed. After the failed coup of July 2016, which killed about 250 people, some 150,000 public employees were dismissed and tens of thousands arrested, including journalists and elected Kurdish politicians. A 2017 referendum abolished the prime ministership and created an executive presidency. He was re-elected in 2018 and, after a runoff, in 2023, amid inflation that exceeded eighty per cent following his insistence on cutting interest rates.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Turkish
- Roles: Prime Minister of Turkey (2003-2014), President of Turkey (2014-present)
