Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born 26 February 1954 in Istanbul) is a Turkish politician who has dominated the country's political landscape for over two decades. He served as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998 under the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi), was briefly jailed in 1999 for reciting a poem deemed to incite religious hatred, and in 2001 co-founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) with Abdullah Gül and others.

After the AKP's landslide victory in the November 2002 elections, Erdoğan became Prime Minister in March 2003. His early tenure was marked by EU accession negotiations (opened in 2005), economic growth, and reforms reducing the military's political role. He won successive parliamentary elections in 2007 and 2011.

In August 2014 he became Turkey's first directly elected president. Following the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016, his government declared a state of emergency and conducted mass purges of the judiciary, military, academia, and civil service. A constitutional referendum in April 2017 replaced Turkey's parliamentary system with an executive presidency, which took effect after the June 2018 elections. He was re-elected in May 2023, defeating Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in a runoff.

Erdoğan's foreign policy has included:

• Military operations in northern Syria against Kurdish YPG forces (Operations Euphrates Shield 2016, Olive Branch 2018, Peace Spring 2019)
• Mediation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative (2022) alongside the UN
• Initial blocking, then approval, of Sweden's NATO accession (ratified January 2024)
• Purchase of Russian S-400 missile systems, leading to Turkey's removal from the F-35 program in 2019
• Vocal criticism of Israel's conduct in Gaza after October 2023

His ideology blends political Islam, Turkish nationalism, and populism, often summarized as neo-Ottomanism by analysts, though Erdoğan himself rejects the label.