Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (pronounced[violence](
listen)(Estambul, 26 February 1954) is a Turkish politician, president of Turkey since August 2014 and, previously, Prime Minister between March 2003 and August 2014. He had previously been mayor of Istanbul (1994-1998) by Refah Partisi.
A Muslim of his own free will, in 1973 he graduated from a school for imams, and later studied economics and commerce at the University of Marmara, where he began his friendship with Necmettin Erbakan. In 1976 he began to be a political militant in the Milli Selamet Partisi with an Islamist orientation.
In 1994 he was the Refah Partisi candidate for mayor of Istanbul and won the municipal elections. He got great popularity being the mayor of this megalopolis. At the end of 1997, during his term as mayor of Istanbul, a court prohibited him from holding any position in the public administration and he was sentenced to ten months in prison, charged with religious intolerance for reading a poem by the Turkish poet Ziya Gokalp at a public act in Siirt, a municipality in eastern Turkey. Due to the situation, he was forced to resign as mayor and left his position on November 6, 1998. After serving four months and ten days in prison, he was released and He withdrew the ban on holding positions in the public administration. Abandoning openly Islamist political positions, he founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001, winner of Turkey's 2002 general election. In the decade and a half since his party came to power, he has contested 14 elections: six legislative, three referendums, three local and two presidential votes and won all of them.
He founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001 and led it to victory in elections in 2002, 2007 and 2011 before being elected president in 2014. Of an Islamist political background and someone who describes himself as himself as a conservative Democrat, he has encouraged liberal-conservative and socially economic politics. Erdoğan has adopted a racial policy against the Kurdish people.
After more than eleven years as Prime Minister of Turkey, in 2014 he stood for the presidential elections, from which he emerged victorious, and was proclaimed Head of State on August 28, 2014, succeeding Abdullah Gül. After Turkey's 2016 coup attempt, and thanks to his victory in Turkey's 2018 presidential election, Erdoğan assumed a wide range of new powers approved in a 2017 constitutional referendum, transforming the presidency into an executive position. preponderant, when before it did not go beyond the merely ceremonial. Since then his government has developed a more ambitious approach to foreign policy towards its neighbors and allies. This trend, which has manifested itself in a more independent attitude and a certain rapprochement towards the positions defended by other moderate Muslim countries, has sometimes been described as "neo-Ottomanism", thereby pointing to Turkey's awareness of its renewed regional influence and its geopolitical weight in the Middle East and the Balkans (where there is a strong Turkish-Muslim presence), which would manifest itself in a certain "orientalization" of its foreign relations.
In his inner circle he is called beyefendi (the great lord) and to his admirers he is the reis (the big boss). Fans of his highlight how he led the country to a new level of economic prosperity and established it as a respected international player. Surpassed by the Father of the Nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
Biography
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was born in Kasımpaşa (Beyoğlu), a working-class neighborhood of Istanbul, to which his family had moved from the Black Sea region in the 1930s. His parents were Ahmet Erdoğan (1905–88) and Tenzile Erdoğan (1924–2011).
Erdoğan spent his early childhood in Rize, where his father was a captain in the Turkish Coast Guard. His summer vacations were spent mainly in Güneysu, Rize, where his family originally came from. Throughout his life, he often returned to this home, and he opened a large mosque on top of a mountain near this town in 2015. The family returned to Istanbul when Erdoğan was 13 years old.
As a teenager, Erdoğan's father provided him with a weekly allowance of 2.5 Turkish lira, less than a dollar. With it, Erdoğan bought postcards and sold them on the street. He sold bottles of water to drivers stuck in traffic. Erdoğan also worked as a peddler selling simit (sesame bread rings), wearing a white coat, and selling simit from a three-wheeled red cart with the rolls stacked behind glass.
According to his official biography, Erdoğan studied Business Administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Business Sciences, now known as the Marmara University Faculty of Economics and Management. However, several Turkish sources dispute that he graduated, or even attended at all.
In the 1980s, he worked as a consultant to private companies.
Political career
In the mid-1970s, Erdoğan joined the youth organization of the Islamist National Salvation Party (MSP, in its Turkish acronym). His political career was interrupted by the 1980 military coup and subsequent ban from his party, but in 1983 he returned to political activity within the Prosperity Party (Refah Partisi) led by former MSP leader Necmettin Erbakan.
Mayor of Istanbul
Erdoğan was the Refah Partisi candidate for mayor of Istanbul in the 1994 municipal elections, and by winning the elections he became the mayor of this megalopolis until 1998, when he was sentenced to ten months in prison for having publicly recited a poem by the national poet Ziya Gökalp ("Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, and believers our soldiers"). The Turkish Constitutional Court considered this act as an attack against the secular principles of the Republic and accused him of religious intolerance. In the fall of the same year, Erdoğan withdrew from the Virtue Party (the Islamist successor party to the Refah Partisi).
Creation of the Justice and Development Party
Erdoğan abandoned openly Islamist ideology and founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001, becoming the party's leader.
Prime Minister
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The AKP emerged victorious in the November 2002 parliamentary elections, but Erdoğan had to wait several months before being able to take office due to his prison record. In March 2003, he officially took office from him, succeeding Turkey's later president from 2007 to 2014, Abdullah Gül, one of the founders of the AKP.
Internal policy
One of the most publicized crises of his period as prime minister was the one generated by the protests in Turkey in 2013 against the attempt to destroy the Taksim Gezi park in Istanbul to build a shopping center. The harshness of the repression of the demonstrations led to a generalization of the protests against his policy, interpreted as an attempt at a radical and absolutist regime by Erdoğan who has been accused by the secular Turks of squandering Atatürk's inheritance with the gradual Islamization of the country and to become a polarizing figure. This discontent was evident during the 2013 protests that lasted for about a month. Although his high popularity and his subsequent election victories silenced criticism of Erdoğan.
Also in 2013, Turkish environmental associations mobilize against the "nature and biodiversity conservation law", which will allow industrial or urbanization projects to be carried out in natural spaces if they are of & #34;overriding public interest". This notion, considered vague, "opens the door to all kinds of abuses", according to the associations. In addition, the construction of some sixty coal-fired power plants is underway or planned. According to Greenpeace, the government "leaves very little room for renewable energy projects" and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing.
Economic policy
When he came to power, Erdogan privatized large public groups such as Türk Telekom, large oil and gas companies, ports and airports. He liberalized the labor market, reformed the banking and credit systems, and encouraged entrepreneurship. This policy significantly increased foreign investment and boosted growth in the early years. In the 2020s, however, Turkey is in economic crisis, with annual inflation estimated at between 108% (according to the government) and 185% (according to independent estimates) in 2022, a drop in the value of the national currency and a very large trade deficit.
Foreign Policy
European Union
Upon taking office as prime minister, Erdoğan declared that his government's first priority would be the culmination of his country's complicated process of accession to the European Union. During his first years as head of the executive, Erdoğan adopted reforms, especially significant in the constitutional spheres (reform of the State, religious freedom, freedom of expression, reform of the Armed Forces, etc.) and criminal (abolition of the death penalty and the crime of adultery, softening of sentences for crimes against the State, etc.), in line with the democratic parameters required for the incorporation of States into the EU and with the severe jurisprudence against Turkey, in these areas, of the European Court of Human Rights.
Turkey obtained the official status of a candidate country for European accession, on the recommendation of the European Commission, which verified the progress that was taking place recently in Turkey and qualified for the first time its sufficiency for the official candidacy. This candidate status allowed Erdoğan to sign the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe together with the EU Member States in October 2004. Days before, at a tripartite summit between Erdoğan, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac, both European leaders assured Turkey of their support for its candidacy, although they warned that negotiations would be "long and difficult".
However, the result of a referendum in France and another referendum in the Netherlands was opposition to the treaty, which meant that the document did not enter into force and caused a European institutional crisis.
Islamic World
In the Islamic world, Erdoğan has supported Turkey's position within NATO, although he did not accept that the United States Army used his country's soil during the Iraq War. This decision strained relations between Türkiye and the United States. However, it did allow the use of Turkish airspace by US aircraft during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Erdoğan's criticism of Israeli President Shimon Peres at the 2009 World Economic Forum on the situation in Palestine and Israel's attack on the Gaza flotilla in June 2010 served to accentuate this trend, and has led to a cooling of the traditional relationship of cordiality with the Jewish country.
President
2014 presidential election and 2015 general election
On August 28, 2014, in the Turkish plenary hall, Erdoğan was officially proclaimed President of Turkey, succeeding Abdullah Gül, after being elected for the first time in the country by the citizens. As the first act, he honored the political career of his predecessor, and announced that he is about to arrive "a new Turkey". During his proclamation, opposition groups left the hall, in addition to throwing objects at the newly appointed president from their stands.
Following the June 2015 election results in which his party lost the majority needed to form a government and the failure of political parties with parliamentary representation to reach agreements to form a coalition government, Erdoğan called new general elections for November 1 of that same year, in which his party (AKP) regained the necessary majority in parliament, after obtaining 49.5% of the votes, to form a government and thus also pave the way for the reform of the Constitution in order to establish said presidential regime.
Coup attempt
On the afternoon of July 15, 2016, troops belonging to a faction of the Turkish army linked to the movement of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen (a former ally of Erdoğan) issued a statement in which they claimed to have seized power, considering calling Erdoğan a traitor and claiming that political power had been overthrown. The president, who was on vacation in Marmaris, addressed the nation via live video call to a CNN Türk journalist. During his speech, he appealed to the public to take to the streets and show their support for his government: "I urge our people, the whole world, to fill the squares and streets of the country to give them (to the coup leaders) the necessary response."
In the following hours, millions of Turks took to the streets as Erdoğan had requested, leading to several violent clashes between the protesters and the coup plotters, for example, on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul, where the The coup leaders fired at the demonstrators. The official media reported that several Turkish policemen had detained some rebel officials and asked that the rest surrender. Thus, at dawn the Turkish intelligence agency (MIT) declared the uprising that had failed. It left a total of 290 victims, 47 of them civilians and the rest military rebels and policemen loyal to Erdoğan. Around 1,400 people were injured. On the other hand, the attack by the coup leaders with combat helicopters on the Turkish Parliament left twelve parliamentarians dead.
Around dawn, Erdoğan arrived at Atatürk airport, after which he went on television saying that the instigators of the coup would pay a “heavy price” for their “betrayal.” 754 military personnel, including high-ranking officers, were arrested in the first hours after the coup attempt and more than 25,000 in the following weeks. The Turkish government even took measures that in some cases violated basic rights, such as the presumption of innocence when carrying out a "purge"; and fire or imprison 127,000 civil servants, including judges, prosecutors, police officers, teachers, professors and administrators suspected of being ideologically linked to the coup leaders.
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2017 constitutional referendum and 2018 presidential election
In early 2017 the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) announced its support for the AKP to amend the constitution.
Internal policy
Contempt trials against President Erdoğan have increased since his election as president in 2014. Many politicians, activists and journalists who have questioned his rule have been imprisoned and media outlets critical of his policies have also been ordered closed. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), in 2019 Turkey was one of the worst countries to practice journalism, ranking 157 out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index.
On the other hand, the management of the 2020 coronavirus disease pandemic in Turkey has increased tension between the Erdoğan government and the municipalities of several cities in the country, in the hands of the opposition. So the crisis became a new terrain of political struggle in Turkey.
February 2023 earthquakes
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Twitter that "search and rescue teams were immediately dispatched" to the affected area. Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu urged residents to refrain from entering damaged buildings. On 7 February, President Erdoğan declared a 3-month state of emergency in the 10 affected provinces.
Due to freezing temperatures in affected areas in both Turkey and Syria, Hatay Mayor Lütfü Savaş warned of the risk of hypothermia. Several tens of thousands of people across the region were left homeless and they spent the night in cold weather. Mosques in Turkey were used as shelters for people unable to return home due to freezing temperatures. In Gaziantep, people sought refuge in shopping malls, stadiums, community centers, and mosques. Officials plan to open hotels in Antalya, Alanya and Mersin to temporarily accommodate the affected population. The authorities were criticized by residents of the province who criticized the "insufficient search and rescue efforts". The Hatay Airport runway was badly damaged, making rescue efforts difficult. On February 7, authorities said that 1,846 people in the province had been rescued.
On February 11, German and Austrian rescue workers deployed in Turkey's Hatay province suspended operations, citing a worsening security situation stemming from "food shortages and problematic water supplies in the area". The Austrian team subsequently resumed operations when Turkish Ground Forces provided protection. On 12 February, rescuers from the Israeli search and rescue group United Hatzalah also withdrew, citing "intelligence of a concrete and immediate threat to the Israeli delegation". The government said it would pay compensation to those who have lost their homes. President Erdoğan said £15,000 in relocation assistance per household would be given to those whose homes suffered moderate, severe or total destruction. Rental assistance of up to ₺5,000 would be given to homeowners and ₺2,000 to renters.
Foreign Policy
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European Union
In response to the Turkish government's reaction to the attempted coup, the European Union (EU) warned that Erdoğan "does not have a blank check after the coup to do as he pleases". Faced with this, bilateral relations worsened, which ultimately led Erdoğan to strengthen Russia-Turkey relations.
During the migration crisis in Europe, Erdoğan criticized the supposed passivity of the EU regarding Syrian refugees, accusing European leaders of failing to comply with the bilateral pact reached in 2016 for the reception of refugees by the Member States of the Union. In this pact, the EU promised to disburse aid of 3 billion euros to meet the basic needs of refugees in Turkey, but Erdoğan has stated on several occasions that only a part of this money was disbursed and that the Member States have not welcomed the number of refugees they had committed to.
In this context, relations between Germany and Turkey became even more tense. The situation was of particular importance due in part to the significant presence of Turkish immigration in Germany.
Islamic World
Syrian Civil War
Since August 2016, Turkish regular troops have been in Syria, as part of Operation Euphrates Shield, which aimed to establish a security strip on Turkey's border with Syria that would be free of both Islamic State and Islamic State. the People's Protection Units (YPG) — a Kurdish militia supported by the United States that Turkey links to the PKK, a Kurdish armed group that operates in Turkish territory, and therefore considers these militias a terrorist group — and for which the government The Turkish government mobilized its infantry, artillery, tanks and aviation using various Sunni and Turkmen militias from the Free Syrian Army, as well as recruits from refugee camps. By March 2017, Türkiye terminated the operation.
In June 2017 Turkey completed the construction of a wall on the border between Syria and Turkey with an extension of 828 km. Additionally, in January 2018 Turkey launched its second military offensive (Operation Olive Branch) in northern Syria to combat the YPG, which controlled cities such as Afrin and Manbij.
In October 2019, Turkey launched its third military offensive (Operation Spring of Peace) in collaboration with the Free Syrian Army with the aim of forming a buffer zone 30 km wide and more than 400 km long in Syrian territory. The goal is to liberate the area from the Kurdish YPG militias.
Awards
In May 2010, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the European University of Madrid, for his dedication and support for projects that promote understanding and reconciliation between peoples and for his commitment to the values of the Alianza de Civilizations in the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures.
See also: List of honorary doctorates awarded to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan