Süleyman Demirel
Süleyman Demirel was prime minister of Turkey seven times over four decades and its president from 1993 to 2000, the shepherd's son from Isparta who became a dam engineer, the leader of the centre-right from 1964, the man the army removed by memorandum in 1971 and by coup in 1980 and banned from politics for seven years, who came back in 1987 by referendum and in 1991 by election, and who as president in 1997 presided over the third military intervention, the postmodern coup that forced the Islamist Erbakan out. The country called him Baba, the father, and the joke was that he had been in and out of office so often that he kept his hat on. He was born in 1924 in the village of Islamkoy, studied civil engineering in Istanbul and in the United States, and was the director of state hydraulic works at thirty, building the dams of the 1950s, before Morrison-Knudsen and then politics. He took the Justice Party in 1964 as the heir of the hanged Menderes's voters and won the election of 1965 with an absolute majority. The first government was the growth of the 1960s and the street violence of the end of the decade, which the generals ended with the memorandum of 12 March 1971 telling him to go, which he did. The 1970s were the coalitions with the Islamists and the nationalists, the Nationalist Front governments that armed one side of a street war that killed five thousand people by 1980, and the 24 January economic programme of that year that Ozal wrote for him. The coup of 12 September 1980 removed him and Ecevit alike and the constitution of 1982 banned them both. He led the True Path Party from behind until the referendum of 1987 lifted the ban by a hair, won the election of 1991, and in 1993, when Ozal died, was elected president by the parliament. The presidency was the Kurdish war at its height, the coalition governments that came and went, and the National Security Council's memorandum of 28 February 1997 that listed what Erbakan's government must do about religion in public life, which Demirel enforced by refusing to reappoint him. He left office in 2000 when the parliament refused him a second term, and died in Ankara in June 2015 at ninety.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2015 CE
- Nationality: Turkish
- Roles: prime minister, president, politician
