Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became president of Turkey in 2014, and before that, he was prime minister from 2003 to 2014. Starting with a 2016 coup attempt that nearly toppled his government, Erdoğan’s rule grew significantly more authoritarian. The ensuing crackdown on dissidents or perceived dissidents saw the arrest or firing of tens of thousands of civil servants and members of the armed forces, alarming international observers and human rights groups. This continued a decline in Erdoğan’s international image as a democrat following a term as prime minister that at first seemed to establish Turkey as a model of economic growth and Islamic democracy, but later was marred by the erosion of Turkey’s record on human rights and political freedoms.

In 2001, when Erdoğan organized the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey was mired in debt, inflation, and low employment. By 2011, AKP had become the first Turkish party to win three general elections in a row and the first to win a majority of the popular vote. Despite fears that the Islamist AKP would undermine the secular government, Erdoğan focused on economic reforms and infrastructure projects that made Turkey prosperous. Also in 2011, his government asserted civilian authority over the military by prosecuting officers involved in “Ergenekon,” an alleged conspiracy to stage a coup.

In 2013, however, Erdoğan’s aura began to fade amid accusations of corruption and repression of free speech. The downturn in Erdoğan’s international reputation began that year at Gezi Park in Istanbul, where riot police crushed a demonstration by a handful of environmentalists with overwhelming force. Outrage drew 100,000 protesters to the park to defy Erdoğan’s authoritarian tactics. In December 2013, the scandal dealt another blow to Erdoğan’s government. Three cabinet ministers resigned after family members and business associates were arrested in a broad investigation of corruption. Erdoğan said political enemies in the judiciary were behind the charges, and the purges of 2016–17 seemed to be his chance to quash this opposition. However, though Erdoğan faced increasing international criticism for repressing political opposition and navigated a number of controversies throughout the early 2020s, he held on to a large base of support in Turkey. In May 2023, he defeated rival Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in a run-off election and secured another term as president.

Born: February 26, 1954, Istanbul, Turkey

Nationality: Turkish.

Education: Marmara University, Istanbul, 1981, business management.

Religious Affiliation: Sunni Muslim.

Position, Title, or Affiliation: President of Turkey, 2014–

Overview

In 2014, Erdoğan was elected president with 51.79 percent of the vote, ending his twelve-year run as prime minister. However, he has kept himself as the main face of the Turkish government, turning the largely ceremonial post of president into a power center. His hand-picked successor as prime minister was Ahmet Davutoğlu, who was replaced in 2016 by Binali Yildirim. Following the coup attempt of 2016, Erdoğan declared a state of emergency and began large-scale purges of the military and civil service. In 2017, voters narrowly approved a constitutional referendum that converted Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential republic, abolishing the office of prime minister and increasing the powers of the president, making Erdoğan the head of government, head of state, and head of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Despite this, a currency and debt crisis in 2018 led to a slide in popularity for Erdoğan’s AKP, which saw significant losses in the 2019 Turkish local elections. However, the AKP’s fortunes were reversed in May 2023 when Erdoğan won re-election in a runoff election, despite a narrow victory in the general election a few weeks earlier.

Early Life and Mayor of Istanbul

One of five children in an observant Muslim family, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan grew up in Rize, a port town on the Black Sea in eastern Turkey, though he was born in Istanbul. His father served in the Coast Guard. The family moved to Istanbul’s rough Kasımpaşa district when Erdoğan was thirteen, and later in life, he held onto a sense of connection with devout, lower-class Turks—long ignored in the country’s politics. As a politician, Erdoğan was well known for the tough-talking ways of his old neighborhood.

Erdoğan attended a religious high school and went on to play semi-professional soccer for a few years. During this time, as an idealistic young man, he became interested in social issues and politics. He studied business at Istanbul’s Marmara University and later became a follower of the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Welfare Party.

In 1994, Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul, then a city of 6.6 million beset by water shortages, traffic congestion, inadequate trash disposal, and paralyzing debt. Taking a business-focused approach to the city’s problems, Erdoğan organized investment in infrastructure projects such as viaducts and bridges and imposed budgets to put the city on a stronger financial footing. Despite his successes as mayor, in 1998, he was removed from office and convicted of “inciting religious hatred.” Erdoğan had recited in public a poem that contained the line “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.” He served four months of a ten-month sentence. The conviction barred him from holding public office.

Rise of the AKP

In 2001, Erdoğan organized the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which won a landslide victory in 2002. AKP won only 34 percent of the popular vote but gained a majority in parliament (363 of 550 seats) because parties with less than 10 percent of the vote are excluded under the Turkish system. Although he was head of the AKP, Erdoğan was not eligible to become prime minister until the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) agreed to a legal change that mooted his 1998 conviction. In 2003, Erdoğan was elected to parliament and became prime minister. He cast himself as a pro-Western conservative, committed to a secular government that allowed everyone, including devout Muslims, to express their beliefs openly.

Under Erdoğan’s leadership, AKP achieved impressive results in the economy and at the polls. Between 2003 and 2013, Turkey built 10,000 miles of new roads, doubled its number of airports from 25 to 50, and invested in ports and pipelines that would make the nation a transport hub for central Asian oil and gas. Tourism, agriculture, manufacturing, and technology businesses thrived, creating demand for skilled employees. The Turkish economy not only survived the global financial crisis of 2008 but registered modest growth, thanks to Erdoğan’s reforms in the banking sector. AKP won a majority in parliament again in 2007 and rose to 50 percent of the popular vote in June 2011.

On social policy, Erdoğan’s most significant initiative was the prosecution of conspirators in the Ergenekon network, a secularist group alleged to be plotting a coup. Eventually, more than a hundred military officers were charged. One in five of Turkey’s generals went to prison. The heads of the army, navy, and air force resigned in protest in July 2011, claiming the charges were false and the evidence fraudulent. Their protest backfired, leaving the military under civilian control for the first time since the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. For decades, the military had portrayed itself as the guardian of the secular foundation of the Turkish government. After Ergenekon, opponents feared the way had been cleared for AKP to begin the Islamization of the government.

US Relations and Gezi Park

In foreign policy, Erdoğan established a more muscular role for Turkey as a center of influence in the Middle East. He also worked to repair strained relations with Washington. In March 2013, Erdoğan accepted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s official apology for the deaths of eight Turkish citizens in the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident. To make the rapprochement possible, Erdoğan had to distance himself from earlier remarks in which he equated Zionism with fascism. Netanyahu’s apology came at the urging of President Barack Obama, who welcomed Erdoğan at the White House in May 2013. The two leaders conferred about the civil war in Syria, one of Turkey’s closest allies until 2011. Erdoğan turned against President Bashar al-Assad when the Syrian government used air strikes to suppress a popular uprising. Turkey became the rebels’ most important source of support, providing shelter and covert supply lines to the Free Syrian Army.

Erdoğan’s moment in the sun, as a leader who was respected by the West and admired by oppressed peoples of the Islamic world, turned dark after the violence at Taksim Gezi Park. Weeks of furious anti-Erdoğan protests in June 2013 began with a relatively small demonstration by fifty environmentalists who wanted to save one of the few green spaces remaining in Istanbul. Riot police cleared the park with overwhelming force, even tear-gassing a nearby metro station. The combination of police violence and lack of news coverage (the national CNN affiliate showed a documentary about penguins while the tumult was going on) roused a previously dormant opposition to action. As crowds of 100,000 filled Gezi Park and demonstrations sprang up throughout Turkey, protesters denounced Erdoğan as an enemy of democracy and free speech.

Turkey under Erdoğan had, in fact, imprisoned more journalists than any other country at that time, most of them Kurds who were charged under anti-terrorism laws. Novelist Orhan Pamuk was tried in 2005 for “insulting Turkish identity;” the charges were dropped in 2006 when Pamuk won a Nobel Prize. After Gezi Park, fines were levied against television stations that showed images of the protests. More often, punishment for opposing the government came by indirect means. Koc Holding, which owned a hotel where protesters took refuge, became the target of a tax investigation. Long after Gezi Park, Erdoğan seemed not to have gained perspective on the event as a protest by citizens with a grievance. Instead, he saw it as the work of political enemies. In March 2014, when fifteen-year-old Berkin Elvan died after lying in a coma for nine months (he had been hit by a tear gas canister at Gezi Park), Erdoğan called the deceased teenager a terrorist. New riots erupted in thirty cities and towns across Turkey.

Erdogan-Gulen Split and Coup Attempt

On December 17, 2013, three cabinet ministers suddenly resigned. Although they were not arrested, their sons were brought in on charges of graft, along with dozens of business associates who prospered from government contracts, particularly in construction. Reportedly, investigators tried to question Erdoğan’s son, Bilal. Suleyman Aslan, former president of the state-run Halkbank, was charged with money laundering. Police found $4.5 million in shoe boxes in his house. Erdoğan dismissed the corruption charges as politically motivated. As further details came out, commentators began to see the anti-graft investigation as a struggle between two factions within AKP, one led by Erdoğan, the other by Fethullah Gülen, whose followers held key posts in the judiciary.

Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric and head of the international Hizmet (Service) movement, lives in the United States but was a key ally for Erdoğan in the formation of AKP in 2001. After the party had been in power for some time, differences grew between the two. In November 2013, Erdoğan introduced a bill in parliament to shut down Gülen’s Hizmet schools, which operate throughout Turkey. The proposed shutdown was said to be payback for attempts by judicial investigators to question Hakan Fidan, Erdoğan’s chief of intelligence. The Hizmet schools were an important source of revenue for the Gülenist movement, and the wave of corruption arrests by the judiciary came soon after the bill was introduced.

In March 2014, parliament passed the bill to shut down Hizmet schools, showing Erdoğan’s continued control in the legislative branch. He also took swift action to hobble the judiciary’s investigation of his administration. Soon after the December 2013 arrests, dozens of police assigned to the cases were fired or transferred to traffic duty. Two months later, more than 2,000 police with links to the Gülen faction had been reassigned or dismissed, including chiefs of police for fifteen provinces and the police chiefs of Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. Erdoğan railed against the judiciary for fabricating evidence in the corruption cases. He then shocked the Turkish public and observers worldwide by claiming that Gülenists in the judiciary had also used fraudulent evidence in the Ergenekon prosecutions.

When a dissident faction of the military led a short-lived coup attempt in July 2016, Erdoğan immediately blamed Gülen and his followers for the unrest and initiated sweeping purges of the government and military. Though Gülen denied involvement in the coup attempt, by mid-2017, more than 100,000 people had been arrested or suspended from their positions, including, notably, well over 2,000 judges. The education sector, where Gülenists have been very active, was hit hardest, with more than 15,000 teachers suspended, hundreds of university deans removed from their posts, and hundreds of private and public schools closed.

Earthquake and 2023 Re-Election

Throughout the remainder of the 2010s and into the 2020s, Erdoğan asserted his party’s dominance over political and cultural life in Turkey while maintaining a strong base of popular support, aided by the AKP’s increasing power over Turkish media. During this time, as the Erdoğan government promoted a shift away from secularism and liberalism and continued to crack down on dissent, Turkey faced a number of domestic and international issues, including its ongoing involvement in the Syrian Civil War (2011–), repression of the country’s Kurdish minority, and its struggle to care for its large population of refugees, many of whom had fled conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries in the region. Meanwhile, Erdoğan continued to prioritize Turkey’s economic growth and kept interest rates low, which contributed to skyrocketing inflation by the early 2020s. He also sought to chart a more independent course for Turkey in international affairs. This desire, combined with Erdoğan’s increasing authoritarianism, strained relations with the United States and other democratic allies by the 2020s.

In February 2023, Erdoğan faced one of the biggest crises of his presidency when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey along the country’s border with Syria, killing over 50,000 people in Turkey and thousands in Syria. Erdoğan’s government was criticized for its disaster response and also for its lax enforcement of building codes in the years leading up to the earthquake, which helped Turkey’s booming construction industry but resulted in the construction of many buildings vulnerable to collapse during earthquakes. In response to the disaster, Erdoğan allocated billions of dollars to various government funds intended to support survivors of the earthquake, but his popularity still suffered.

In addition to the fallout from the earthquake, by mid-2023, Turkey faced a cost-of-living crisis, with high inflation placing a strain on many people in the country. For this reason, Erdoğan’s rivals viewed him as vulnerable in the 2023 Turkish presidential election. Erdoğan’s main challenger, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who represented the Republican People’s Party and was a leading figure in the opposition to Erdoğan’s government, was able to force a runoff election during the first round of voting in mid-May 2023 since neither he nor Erdoğan was able to earn over 50 percent of the vote. However, in the runoff election held on May 28, 2023, Erdoğan defeated Kılıçdaroğlu with 52 percent of the vote and secured another five-year term as president. Many observers argued that Erdoğan’s victory would pave the way for further erosions of human rights in Turkey, particularly for members of the LGBTQ+ community, millions of refugees, and ethnic minorities like the Kurds. Others predicted Erdoğan would continue to pursue an independent course in international relations, raising the possibility of disputes with the US and other partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Leading up to Turkey’s March 2024 local elections, Erdoğan announced he would not run for reelection in 2028. However, after CHP’s Ekrem İmamoğlu won the Mayoral election, Erdoğan began attempting to cooperate with the opposing party. For the first time in eight years, Erdoğan met with the CHP leader to “soften” politics. Critics called this meeting an attempt to pave the way to reelection in 2028, as amending the constitution to allow him to remain in power requires the cooperation of the opposing party.

In the eastern province of Van, violent protests erupted in April 2024 after the Turkish government declared President Erdoğan’s AK Party candidate the winner of the mayoral elections despite losing the vote. Pro-Kurdish Abdullah Zeydan won the mayoral election with more than 55 percent of the vote. The government overturned the annulment a few days later because of the widespread protests and outrage from other political parties. In February 2026, Erdoğan carried out a mini cabinet reshuffle, naming Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Akin Gürlek as justice minister and the governor of the eastern province of Erzurum, Mustafa Çiftci as the interior minister.

References

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