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Recep Tayyip Erdogan

President of Turkey

Recep Tayyip Erdoan, (born February 26, 1954, Rize, Turkey), Turkish politician, who served as prime minister (200314) and president (2014 ) of Turkey.

In high school Erdoan became known as a fiery orator in the cause of political Islam. He later played on a professional football (soccer) team and attended Marmara University. During this time he met Necmettin Erbakan, a veteran Islamist politician, and Erdoan became active in parties led by Erbakan, despite a ban in Turkey on religiously based political parties. In 1994 Erdoan was elected mayor of Istanbul on the ticket of the Welfare Party. The election of the first-ever Islamist to the mayoralty shook the secularist establishment, but Erdoan proved to be a competent and canny manager. He yielded to protests against the building of a mosque in the citys central square but banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in city-owned cafs. In 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred after reciting a poem that compared mosques to barracks, minarets to bayonets, and the faithful to an army. Sentenced to 10 months in prison, Erdoan resigned as mayor.

After serving four months of his sentence, Erdoan was released from prison in 1999, and he reentered politics. When Erbakans Virtue Party was banned in 2001, Erdoan broke with Erbakan and helped form the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi; AKP). His party won the parliamentary elections in 2002, but Erdoan was legally barred from serving in parliament or as prime minister because of his 1998 conviction. A constitutional amendment in December 2002, however, effectively removed Erdoans disqualification. On March 9, 2003, he won a by-election and days later was asked by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to form a new government. Erdoan took office on May 14, 2003.

As prime minister, Erdoan toured the United States and Europe in order to dispel any fears that he held anti-Western biases and to advance Turkeys bid to join the European Union. Although the previous government had refused to allow U.S. troops to be stationed in Turkey during the Iraq War, in October 2003 Erdoan secured approval for the dispatch of Turkish troops to help keep the peace in Iraq; Iraqi opposition to the plan, however, prevented such a deployment. In 2004 he sought to resolve the issue of Cyprus, which had been partitioned into Greek and Turkish sectors since a 1974 civil war. Erdoan supported a United Nations plan for the reunification of the island; in April 2004, Turkish Cypriots approved the referendum, but their Greek counterparts rejected it. Tensions between Turkeys secularist parties and Erdoans AKP were highlighted in 2007, when attempts to elect an AKP candidate with Islamist roots to the countrys presidency were blocked in parliament by an opposition boycott. Erdoan called for early parliamentary elections, and his party won a decisive victory at the polls in July.

In early 2008 parliament passed an amendment that lifted a ban on the wearing of head scarvesa sign of religion long contested in Turkeyon university campuses. Opponents of the AKP renewed their charges that the party posed a threat to Turkish secular order, and Erdoans position appeared to come under increasing threat. In March the constitutional court voted to hear a case that called for the dismantling of the AKP and banning Erdoan and dozens of other party members from political life for five years. Erdoan successfully maintained his position, however, when in July 2008 the court ruled narrowly against the partys closure and sharply reduced its state funding instead. In September 2010 a package of constitutional amendments championed by Erdoan was approved by a national referendum. The package included measures to make the military more accountable to civilian courts and to increase the legislatures power to appoint judges.

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While campaigning for parliamentary elections in early 2011, Erdoan pledged to replace Turkeys constitution with a new one that would strengthen democratic freedoms. In June 2011 Erdoan secured a third term as prime minister when the AKP won by a wide margin in parliamentary elections. However, the AKP fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to unilaterally write a new constitution.

In the summer of 2013 Erdoan faced an outpouring of public discontent after Istanbul police violently broke up a small protest against the planned conversion of a public park into a shopping complex. The incident triggered larger demonstrations around the country decrying what protesters described as the growing authoritarianism of Erdoan and the AKP. Erdoan responded defiantly, dismissing the protesters as thugs and vandals.

Barred by AKP rules from seeking a fourth term as prime minister, Erdoan instead ran for the largely ceremonial role of president in 2014. In accordance with the constitutional amendments of 2007, the 2014 election was the first time that the president was elected directly, rather than by the parliament. Erdoan won easily in the first round of voting and was inaugurated on August 28, 2014. Immediately upon taking office, Erdoan began to call for a new constitution following parliamentary elections in 2015; it was widely believed that he would seek to expand the powers of the presidency. In June 2015 the AKP failed to win a parliamentary majority for the first time since its formation, receiving just 41 percent of the vote. The result was generally seen as a blow to Erdoans plans for an expanded presidency, but the reversal proved to be a brief one: in November 2015 the AKP easily won back its parliamentary majority in a snap election triggered by the failure of negotiations to form a governing coalition after the June election.

...In Indonesia the Prosperous Justice Party took part in legislative elections in 2004. Turkey allowed Islamists not only to participate in elections but also to govern at the national level. In 2002 Recep Tayyip Erdoan, chairman of the Party of Justice and Development, which won a majority of seats in that years general elections, formed a pragmatic Islamist government that cultivated...

...(Adalet ve Kalknma Partisi; AKP), a party with Islamist roots, swept the parliamentary elections. It came to power under the ostensible leadership of Abdullah Gl, since party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoan was ineligible to serve in parliament or as prime minister because of a 1998 conviction; a constitutional amendment in late 2002 removed this ineligibility. Erdoan...

In August a group led by Abdullah Gl and Recep Tayyip Erdoan (a former mayor of Istanbul [199498]) struck out to form the AKPor AK Party, ak in Turkish also meaning white or cleanas a democratic, conservative, nonconfessional movement. Unlike its predecessors, the AKP did not centre its image...

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Recep Tayyip Erdogan | president of Turkey | Britannica.com