Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born 26 February 1954) is a Turkish politician who is the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously was Prime Minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and was Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001. Controversies include support for mass immigration to Europe, support for Turkish nationalism among Turkish immigrants to Europe and Turkish minorities elsewhere, Islamization, and a foreign policy that has been described as Neo-Ottoman and pro-Sunni, contributing to the Turkish involvement in the Syrian Civil War.

Personal life and education

Erdoğan was born in Constantinople. His family has descended from Adjara Georgian immigrants who settled from Batumi to Rize. (He announced his origins during his visit to Georgia in 2004.) Erdoğan spent his early childhood in Rize where his family had settled, before returning to Istanbul at the age of 13. After graduating from a religious high school İmam Hatip school he studied management at Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences (İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi). Erdoğan played semi-professional football in a local neighbourhood club for 16 years.

Joining politics

Mayor of Istanbul 1994

As mayor of Istanbul, renamed tram cars with his initials (RTE) and bought a ferry named "Recep Tayyip Erdogan". These vehicles are still in use today (as of 2008). Erdogan also condoned the building of unlicenced houses resulting in massive gecekondus (ghettos) surrounding the town. Their inhabitants repaid him in votes.

1998 imprisonment

Erdoğan's Islamist sympathies earned him a conviction in 1998. As Mayor of Istanbul, Erdoğan was the most prominent of 200 mayors and other local officials in Turkey; because he was a national figure and hero to millions of Islamic-oriented voters, his case drew considerable attention.

In 1997, the Welfare Party was declared unconstitutional and was shut down on the grounds of threatening the secular nature of the state. In 1998, Erdoğan become a constant speaker at the demonstrations held by his colleagues from the banned Welfare Party. Secularism in Turkey has been taken very seriously since the establishment of the state with Kemalist ideology as its guiding principle. In line with the Atatürk's Reforms, the Constitution of Turkey states that laïcité, social equality, and equality before law are the main and unchangeable characteristics of Turkey. Kemalist ideology also adopted the position of "public reason", which claimed that activities falling outside of the private sphere should be secular and no religious group should be given permission to dominate over other belief systems. Any activity or promotion of domination over other belief systems are felt to fall under the somewhat controversial concept of "incitement to religious hatred", which has been part of the Turkish constitution since its establishment. The "religious hatred" concept has been used against the movements that promoted the reestablishment of the abolished Ottoman Caliphate and Islamic fundamentalist positions. There is no question that Erdoğan is pro-Islamic (he calls himself a religious conservative) but the extent of his position towards the fundamentally secular nature of the state was called into question on 12 December, 1997 at a public meeting in Siirt in Eastern Anatolia. In his speech, Erdoğan identified Turkish society as having "two fundamentally different camps" – those who blindly follow the Atatürk's Reforms [seculars] and the Muslims who unite Islam with Sharia.

Erdoğan was tried and convicted of inciting "religious hatred" in 1998. He was sentenced to ten months' imprisonment of which he served four between March and July 1999.

Prime Ministership

On 17 October, 2006, Prime Minister Erdoğan suffered a mild shock in public attributed to hypoglycemia, caused by a combination of intense work and Ramadan fasting. He was hospitalized but the doctors determined that he only needed a few days of rest and viewed his state of health as not being of serious concern. His transportation to the hospital became a phenomenon as well when the driver of his armoured vehicle accidentally locked the door to the vehicle leaving the keys inside. The security system of the vehicle locked all the doors with Erdoğan still inside, unconscious. A hammer was brought in from a nearby construction yard to break the bulletproof windows of the vehicle and rescue the Prime Minister.

Presidentship

In November 2016, the Turkish government blocked access to social media in all of Turkey as well as sought to completely block Internet access for the citizens in the southeast of the country. Since the 2016 coup attempt, authorities arrested or imprisoned more than 90,000 Turkish citizens.

Erdoğan supported the 2017 referendum which changed Turkey's parliamentary system into a presidential system, thus setting for the first time in Turkish history a term limit for the head of government (two full five-year terms). Erdoğan has since been tackling, but also accused of contributing to, the Turkish currency and debt crisis of 2018, which has caused a significant decline in his popularity and is widely believed to have contributed to the results of the 2019 local elections, in which his party lost power in large cities such as Ankara and Istanbul to opposition parties for the first time in 15 years.

In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Turkey's top Muslim scholar and President of Religious Affairs, Ali Erbaş, said in a Friday Ramadan announcement that country condemns homosexuality because it "brings illness," insinuating that same sex relations are responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan backed Erbaş, saying that what Erbaş "said was totally right."

Sewer rat

As the ministry statement did not clarify the indecent statement, journalists desperately googled to find out what was said — only to come across “kanalratte,” the German term for a sewer rat. Engaging in some impassioned campaign rally speech ahead of state elections in Lower Saxony, Kubicki criticized his fellow German politicians for what he considered to be a lax policy on Syrian refugees. He said Erdogan benefited from refugees like a “sewer rat.” Within hours of the ministry statement, the insult, previously unknown save for a few German-language readers, became news in the international media. In Ankara, Turkish Parliament Speaker Mustafa Sentop wrote to his German counterpart that the Turks were “outraged” by the insult to their president. Kubicki, a veteran politician from the FDP and pro-business kingmaker party currently within Germany’s ruling coalition, defended himself by saying that a sewer rat was no insult. “A sewer rat is a small, cute, but at the same time clever and crafty creature that also appears in children’s stories,” Kubicki said, citing the popular animated movie “Ratatouille” as an example.

Family

Erdoğan married Emine Gülbaran (b. 1955, Siirt) on 4 July 1978. They have two sons, Ahmet Burak (b. 1979) and Necmettin Bilal (b. 1981), and two daughters, Esra (b. 1983) and Sümeyye (b. 1985). His father, Ahmet Erdoğan, died in 1988 and his mother, Tenzile Erdoğan, died in 2011 at the age of 87. Erdoğan has a brother, Mustafa (b. 1958), and a sister, Vesile (b. 1965). From his father's first marriage to Havuli Erdoğan (d. 1980), he had two half-brothers: Mehmet (1926–1988) and Hasan (1929–2006).

External links

Article archives

• Amren: Turkey
• Gatestone Institute: Turkey