Biography

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born 26 February 1954), commonly referred by to his initials RTE, is a Turkish politician who is the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as the prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He also co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001.

Born in Güneysu, Rize, Erdoğan moved with his family to Istanbul at the age of 13. He studied business administration at the Aksaray Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences, before working as a consultant and senior manager in the private sector. During this time, Erdoğan became active in parties led by veteran Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan, starting as his party's Beyoğlu district chair in 1984 and Istanbul chair in 1985. Following the 1994 local elections, Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul, where he implemented a series of reforms that modernized the city's infrastructure and economy. In 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred and banned from politics after reciting a poem by Ziya Gökalp that compared mosques to barracks and the faithful to an army. Erdoğan was released from prison in 1999 and subsequently abandoned openly Islamist politics, breaking with Erbakan to form the AKP, a party designed to follow the example of the European Christian democratic parties.

Erdoğan led the AKP to a landslide victory in the election for the Grand National Assembly in 2002, only a year after founding the party. After his political ban was lifted by prime minister Abdullah Gül, Erdoğan became prime minister after winning a by-election in Siirt in 2003. Erdoğan led the AKP to two more election victories in 2007 and 2011. Reforms made in the early years of Erdoğan's tenure as prime minister granted Turkey the start of EU membership negotiations. Furthermore, Turkey experienced an economic recovery from the economic crisis of 2001 and saw investments in infrastructure including roads, airports, and a high-speed train network. He also won two successful constitutional referendums in 2007 and 2010. Erdoğan reduced the military influence on politics, withstood the criticism of the armed forces' e-memorandum documents and remained controversial for his close links with the Gülen movement, with whom the AKP was accused of orchestrating purges against military officers through the Balyoz and Ergenekon trials. In late 2012, his government began peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to end the Kurdish–Turkish conflict, negotiations which ended three years later.

In 2014, Erdoğan became the country's first directly elected president. Erdoğan's presidency has been marked by democratic backsliding and a shift towards a more authoritarian style of government and has faced allegations of human rights abuses, suppression of dissents and suppression of freedom of speech. He has been criticized for his handling of several issues, including the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the 2016 failed coup attempt, his economic policies and the ongoing conflict in Syria, which is believed to have contributed to the bad results of the 2019 local elections, in which his party lost power in large cities to opposition parties for the first time in 15 years. Erdoğan supported the 2017 referendum, changing Turkey's parliamentary system into a presidential system, introducing term limit for the head of government (two full five-year terms), and greatly expanding executive powers. This new system of government formally came into place after the 2018 general election, where Erdoğan became an executive president. His party however lost the majority in the parliament since then and is currently in a coalition (People's Alliance) with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Especially starting from 2018, he has decreased the independence of the Central Bank and pursued a highly unorthodox monetary policy, leading to high inflation rates and the depreciation of the value of the Turkish lira. From 2020, he led Turkey's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination rollout. In foreign policy, as a result of the Syrian civil war, Turkey became the world's largest refugee hosting country since 2014 and launched operations against the Islamic State, Syrian Democratic Forces and Assad's forces. Following the ratification of the Libya–Turkey maritime deal, Turkey has sent military assistance in support of the United Nations-recognized government. He responded to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine by closing the Bosphorus to Russian naval reinforcements, brokering a deal between Russia and Ukraine regarding export of grain, and mediating a prisoner exchange.