Abdullah Gül

Abdullah Gül: The Placeholder Who Wasn't

In November 2002, Abdullah Gül became prime minister of Turkey largely because his party's real leader legally could not. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, banned from holding office over a prior conviction, needed someone to hold the seat and steer the legislation that would lift the ban — and Gül, the man who co-founded their party with him, did exactly that, then quietly stepped aside once the law changed. It would have been easy to read Gül as a footnote to Erdoğan's rise. Instead he went on to become Turkey's first president with an openly Islamist political background, survive a constitutional crisis that pitted him against the country's military and secular establishment, and, decades later, break with Erdoğan altogether to defend an opposition politician he saw as unjustly prosecuted.

From Kayseri to the Islamic Development Bank

Gül was born October 29, 1950, in Kayseri, in central Anatolia, the son of a retired air force mechanic — a modest background typical of the provincial, religiously conservative Anatolian middle class that would later form the core of his political movement. He studied economics at Istanbul University, where he grew close to the Islamist-nationalist National Turkish Students' Union and developed the hardline religious-political convictions of his youth, at one point declaring that "the republican period has ended" and that Turkey's secular system had failed. He pursued doctoral research at the University of Exeter in England from 1976 to 1978, examining Turkey's economic relations with Muslim-majority nations, and completed his PhD at Istanbul University in 1983. He then taught at Sakarya University, where he helped found the engineering department, before spending nearly a decade, from 1983 to 1991, as an economist and eventually associate professor of international economics at the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — a technocratic credential that distinguished him from purely activist Islamist politicians of his generation.

From Welfare Party Firebrand to AKP Co-Founder

Gül entered Turkish parliament in 1991 representing Kayseri for the Islamist Welfare Party, rising to become the party's deputy chairman for foreign affairs by 1993. When the Constitutional Court banned the Welfare Party in 1998 for anti-secular activity, Gül moved to the successor Virtue Party's modernist faction; when that party split between hardliners and reformers in 2000, he and Erdoğan together led the moderate wing. After Virtue's own closure in 2001, Gül and Erdoğan co-founded the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in August 2001, deliberately positioning it as "a moderate conservative party in the European tradition" rather than an explicitly Islamist movement — a rebranding that proved decisive in the party's landslide 2002 election victory.

Prime Minister, Then Foreign Minister

Because Erdoğan remained barred from office, Gül became prime minister on November 16, 2002, forming Turkey's 58th government. His administration's first major task was pushing through the legal changes that lifted Erdoğan's ban; once that was accomplished in March 2003, Gül stepped down and became deputy prime minister and foreign minister, a post he held until 2007. In that role he drove Turkey's European Union accession negotiations and worked to improve relations with Syria and the Central Asian states, building the diplomatic reputation that would carry him toward the presidency.

The 2007 Presidential Crisis

Gül's 2007 candidacy for the presidency — a position with substantial symbolic weight as guardian of Turkey's secular constitutional order — triggered fierce resistance from secularists alarmed at his Islamist roots and, notably, his wife's headscarf. The Constitutional Court initially blocked his candidacy on procedural grounds; Gül withdrew temporarily on May 6, 2007, before returning to the race after constitutional amendments introduced direct presidential elections. He was elected on August 28, 2007, by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in a third voting round requiring only a simple majority. The country's military chief boycotted his swearing-in, the opposition Republican People's Party refused to attend, and commentators described his inauguration — breaking with the tradition of excluding headscarved wives from state ceremonies — as marking a genuinely new era in Turkish political life.

A More Measured President

Gül's 2007–2014 presidency combined real institutional consequence with moments of accommodation his critics found troubling. He signed a June 2013 bill restricting alcohol sales that helped ignite the Gezi Park protests, along with 2013 legislation tightening internet regulation and 2014 laws expanding political control over the judiciary and the National Intelligence Organization — measures that, taken together, widened the executive's reach in ways later governments would extend further. At the same time, he took what observers described as a more measured, mediating approach during both the Gezi protests and the corruption scandals that shook the AKP in his final years, a notably calmer public posture than Erdoğan would later adopt in comparable crises.

The Break with Erdoğan

Gül's partnership with Erdoğan, forged in the founding of the AKP and Gül's own facilitation of Erdoğan's political rehabilitation, cooled markedly after Gül left the presidency in 2014. He largely withdrew from active politics, focusing on social and cultural work, before breaking his public silence in 2025 to defend opposition politician Ekrem İmamoğlu against what Gül characterized as injustice — a rare and pointed departure from the loyalty he had shown the movement he helped build.

Why Abdullah Is Called a Genius

The specific, sourced case for Gül's genius is technocratic and institutional rather than visionary: an economist with real doctoral training and years inside a multilateral development bank, who helped engineer the rebranding of an Islamist political tradition into an electable, EU-oriented conservative party, then personally absorbed the legal risk of holding Turkey's premiership just long enough to legalize his own party's real leader — a maneuver requiring exact legal and political timing rather than force. His subsequent navigation of the 2007 constitutional crisis, winning the presidency despite an active military boycott and a divided judiciary, demonstrated a capacity to out-legislate, rather than out-fight, an entrenched secular establishment.

The honest counter-case is that Gül's presidency also signed into law the surveillance, judicial-control, and internet-restriction measures that later fed Turkey's broader democratic erosion, even if his personal governing style was more moderate than Erdoğan's. His 2025 break with his own movement, defending a jailed opposition figure, reads less as a lifelong commitment to pluralism than as a late reckoning with a system he had spent decades helping to build.

Legacy

Gül's career traces the arc of Turkish political Islam's move from the margins into government and back toward internal fracture — the man who legalized Erdoğan's path to power, then, a generation later, publicly distanced himself from where that power had ended up.

Achievements

• Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath — 2008
• Grand Cross with Chain of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (civil)
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• Affiliated with Sakarya University
• Educated at Kayseri Lyceum, Istanbul University Faculty of Economics and University of Exeter
• Worked as politician, diplomat and economist