Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Who is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan?

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the 25th and current Prime Minister of Turkey, in office since 2003. He is also the chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party, which holds a majority of the seats in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Erdoğan served as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He graduated from an Imam Hatip school, an Islamic high school, before studying in Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Commercial Sciences, where he graduated in 1981. Erdoğan was also a semi-professional footballer from 1969 to 1982. Erdoğan was elected Mayor of Istanbul in the local elections of 27 March 1994. He was banned from office and sentenced to a ten-month prison term for reciting a poem during a public address in the province of Siirt in 1997. After less than four months in prison, Erdoğan established the Justice and Development Party in 2001. From its first year, the AKP became the largest publicly supported political movement in Turkey. In the general election of 2002 the AKP won 34% of the vote and nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament, forming the first single-party government.

45 years after Turkey signed an Association Agreement with the EU, the negotiations for Turkey's accession to the EU started during Erdoğan's tenure. Parallel to this, inflation, which had for decades adversely affected the country's economy, was brought under control and the Turkish Lira was re-valued. Interest rates were reduced and per capita income grew significantly.