Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: The Longest Game in Turkish Politics

In 1999 the former mayor of Istanbul went to prison for four months for reciting a poem. From his cell he released an album called *This Song Doesn't End Here*; it sold more than a million copies and became Turkey's best-selling record of the year. Four years later he was prime minister. Almost every element of the career that followed is visible in that sequence - the religious-nationalist vocabulary, the instinct for turning punishment into publicity, the refusal to accept that a ban was final.

Kasımpaşa

He was born on 26 February 1954 in Kasımpaşa, a working-class district of Beyoğlu in Istanbul, into a conservative Muslim family with roots in Adjara, in what is now Georgia. His father was a coastguard and sea captain; his mother was Tenzile Mutlu. As a teenager he sold simit and water to drivers in the street and bought and resold postcards, and he played semi-professional football for Camialtıspor. The Kasımpaşa manner - blunt, combative, unembarrassed by its origins - has been the core of his political persona for fifty years.

He finished Kasımpaşa Piyale Primary School in 1965 and the Istanbul İmam Hatip religious vocational high school in 1973, then studied business administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences, now part of Marmara University, though the legitimacy of that degree has been publicly contested. He joined the National Salvation Party in 1976 as head of its Beyoğlu youth branch, moved to the private sector after the 1980 military coup, and joined the Welfare Party in 1983, chairing its Istanbul branch by 1985.

Mayor of Istanbul

In 1994 he ran for mayor of Istanbul as a dark horse and won with 25.19 per cent of a fragmented vote, the first Welfare Party mayor of the city. The record was pragmatic rather than ideological: four billion dollars of infrastructure investment, work on the chronic water shortages, air pollution and traffic, and municipal debt paid down. He received a UN-Habitat award for convening the first roundtable of mayors at the Istanbul conference. Secular Turkey had expected an Islamist disaster and got a competent administrator - a lesson he would apply nationally.

The Poem and the Prison

In December 1997 he recited verses comparing mosques to barracks and the faithful to soldiers. He was convicted under Article 312/2 of the penal code for inciting religious hatred, sentenced to ten months, reduced to four, and served them from March to July 1999. The conviction also carried a ban from political office. After his release he spent time in Tetovo, in North Macedonia. When the Virtue Party was banned in 2001, he and Abdullah Gül led a group of reformers out of the Islamist tradition to found the Justice and Development Party, presented deliberately as a broad democratic conservative party rather than a religious one. The AKP took 34.3 per cent in 2002. Erdoğan, still barred, won a by-election in Siirt and became prime minister on 14 March 2003.

The AKP Decade

The first decade was the one that made his reputation abroad. Between 2002 and 2012 real GDP grew 64 per cent and GDP per capita 43 per cent; IMF conditions were met and Turkey's debt to the fund fell from 23.5 billion dollars to 0.9 billion; central bank reserves rose from 26.5 billion to 92.2 billion by 2011; inflation fell from 32 per cent to 9 per cent by 2004. He abolished capital punishment in 2004, passed a comprehensive Labour Act in 2003 with a 45-hour week and anti-discrimination provisions, raised compulsory education from eight years to twelve, quadrupled the education budget, doubled the number of universities from 98 to 186, ran a UNICEF-backed campaign to get girls into school, built 13,500 kilometres of expressway, opened the Marmaray undersea rail tunnel in 2013, restructured healthcare and social security, banned smoking in public places, returned two billion dollars of confiscated minority religious property in 2011 and permitted Turkey's first public Hanukkah celebration in 2015. He curbed the political power of the army, which had removed four governments in forty years. Turkey opened EU accession negotiations on 3 October 2005, and *European Voice* named him European of the Year in 2004. From 2009 he opened a reconciliation process with Turkey's Kurds, apologised for the Dersim massacre in 2011 and entered formal peace talks with the PKK in 2013.

He is the only Turkish prime minister to have won three consecutive general elections, increasing his share each time: 34.3 per cent, then 46.7 in 2007, then 49.83 in 2011.

The Turn

The direction reversed from roughly 2013. Protests that began as a sit-in to save Taksim Gezi Park grew into a national movement against his perceived authoritarianism; an initial apology was followed by a crackdown. A corruption investigation that December reached his close allies. He was elected president in August 2014 with 51.79 per cent, the first directly elected holder of the office. After the AKP lost its majority in June 2015 he ended the Kurdish peace process, stripped the pro-Kurdish HDP of parliamentary immunity and resumed military operations, in fighting that killed a further 6,000 people between 2015 and 2022. A failed coup in July 2016 was followed by purges that reached deep into the judiciary, universities, army and press.

A referendum in 2017 replaced the parliamentary system with an executive presidency, abolishing the office of prime minister. He won the presidency again in 2018 with 52.59 per cent. In 2019 the AKP lost Istanbul and Ankara for the first time in twenty-five years; the government forced a rerun in Istanbul, and Ekrem İmamoğlu won the second vote by a far larger margin. Reporters Without Borders, which had ranked Turkey around 100th on its press freedom index early in his tenure, placed it 153rd of 179 by 2021.

President Without a Prime Minister

His unorthodox insistence on low interest rates during high inflation produced the currency collapse and cost-of-living crisis that has run since 2018. Even so, and even after a slow state response to the February 2023 earthquakes that killed around 50,000 people, he won a runoff on 28 May 2023 with 52.18 per cent against Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on 84 per cent turnout. Abroad he has run an unaligned foreign policy: military operations in Syria and Libya, a temporary block on Finnish and Swedish NATO accession in 2022, the closure of the Bosphorus to Russian naval reinforcement after the invasion of Ukraine, and the brokering of the Black Sea grain deal and prisoner exchanges. In March 2024 he said he would retire when his term ends in 2028. In January 2025 İmamoğlu, the leading opposition figure, was arrested and disqualified from the 2028 election, triggering mass protests.

Why Recep Is Called a Genius

The claim on Erdoğan's behalf is not intellectual. It is that he is among the most effective practising politicians of the century, and the evidence for that is unusually hard: he has won every national contest he has entered since 2002, and has done so while transforming the constitutional order under which those contests are held. The specific skill is a rare double capacity. First, coalition arithmetic - he understood in 2001 that an explicitly Islamist party could not govern Turkey and rebuilt his movement as a conservative-developmentalist one broad enough to attract liberals, Kurds and business, then repeatedly reassembled that base with different components as pieces fell away. Second, an exceptional feel for grievance. The NPR analysis of his 2023 victory identifies exactly what carried him through inflation and an earthquake: combative populism, security fear, nationalist and religious framing, and the argument that his opponent was tied to Kurdish militants. His most durable appeal is genuinely about dignity - a supporter quoted in that coverage said simply that he was more respectful of her choices, meaning the end of the headscarf bans that had barred conservative women from universities and public employment.

The counter-case is the necessary other half. Much of his political survival rests on control rather than persuasion: near-total dominance of Turkey's broadcast media, a judiciary reshaped after 2016, a press freedom ranking that fell from about 100th to 153rd, and, most recently, the imprisonment and disqualification of the opposition's likeliest candidate. His signature economic conviction - that high interest rates cause inflation - has been rejected by almost every economist and has coincided with a currency crisis running since 2018. The honest formulation is that Erdoğan's gift is political, not analytical, and that in the first decade it operated through competitive democratic means while in the second it has increasingly operated by removing the competition. Skill at holding power is not the same thing as skill at governing well, and the distinction is the whole argument about him.

The Unfinished Balance

Erdoğan has governed Turkey for longer than anyone since Atatürk, and has changed it more than anyone since. The roads, airports, hospitals, universities and rail lines are real, and so is the enfranchisement of a religious-conservative majority that had been excluded from Turkish public life for eighty years. So is the democratic backsliding recorded by outside monitors, the ruined lira, and a political system now built almost entirely around one office and one man. He says he will step down in 2028; Turkish politics has learned to wait for the vote before believing it.

Achievements

• President of Turkey (from 2014)
• Prime Minister of Turkey (2003–2014)
• member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (2003–2014)
• mayor of Istanbul (1994–1998)
• Order of the Golden Fleece — 2010
• Order of the Golden Eagle
• Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights
• King Faisal International Prize in Service to Islam — 2010
• Educated at Marmara University and İmam Hatip school