{"id":24551,"date":"2010-11-01T11:59:57","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T09:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=24551"},"modified":"2014-01-05T21:43:01","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T19:43:01","slug":"the-making-of-turkeys-prime-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/11\/01\/the-making-of-turkeys-prime-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"The making of Turkey’s prime minister"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even the most dedicated opponents of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan admit he is charismatic, determined and successful \u2013 and perhaps quite lucky as well. Likely the most popular Turkish political leader since Adnan Menderes, the prime minister from 1950 to 1960 before he was executed by a military junta, Erdo\u011fan also has millions of fans who see him as their ultimate hero.<\/p>\n

\"During
During his studies, Erdo\u011fan played football and joined an anti-communist action group. He was sentenced in 1998 to a 10-month prison term before being elected the prime minister in 2002 elections.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The story of one of the most significant political leaders in the 87-year history of the Turkish Republic began in February 1954, when Erdo\u011fan was born in Kas\u0131mpa\u015fa, a tough, poor neighborhood in Istanbul. His family was originally from Rize, a conservative town on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea and returned there when Tayyip was still a baby, but came back to Istanbul again when he was 13. The future prime minister spent those years attending Istanbul Religious Vocational (Imam-Hatip) High School and selling lemonade and simit (sesame rings) on the city\u2019s streets to make extra money \u2013 a background that instilled in him both an Islamic piety and a business-minded pragmatism.<\/p>\n

While studying business administration at what is today Marmara University\u2019s Faculty of Economics and playing semi-professional football, Erdo\u011fan also engaged in politics by joining the National Turkish Student Union, an anti-communist action group. In 1976, he became the head of a local youth branch of the Islamist National Salvation Party, or MSP, led by Necmettin Erbakan, who would later go on to found the Saadet (Felicity) Party. This was the beginning of Erdo\u011fan\u2019s long career in Islamic politics.<\/p>\n

A rising star<\/p>\n

After the 1980 coup, Erbakan\u2019s movement regrouped under the Welfare Party, or RP, and Erdo\u011fan gradually became one of its stars. In 1991, he became a candidate for Parliament on the party\u2019s ticket and won a seat. But the higher election board cancelled his election due to a technicality, initiating a long chain of events that would convince Erdo\u011fan that he has been wronged by the establishment.<\/p>\n

The big year for Erdo\u011fan, however, was 1994, when he was elected mayor of Istanbul to the shock of the city\u2019s more secular citizens, who thought he would ban alcohol and impose Islamic law. Instead he emerged over the next four years as a pragmatic and successful mayor who tackled many chronic problems in the city, including\u00a0pollution,\u00a0water shortages\u00a0and\u00a0traffic.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, politics was growing tense in Turkey, as the Welfare Party came to power in June 1996 in a coalition government with the center-right True Path Party, or DYP. RP head Erbakan, who became Turkey\u2019s first defiantly Islamist\u00a0prime minister, infuriated the secular camp with his radical rhetoric. Six months later, in February 1997, the military initiated what was later dubbed the \u201cpost-modern coup.\u201d Soon, Erbakan was ousted from power and many Islamic groups were the subject of a crackdown as part of a series of court cases opened by prosecutors who were openly \u201cbriefed\u201d by the generals.<\/p>\n

Erdo\u011fan was caught up in this crackdown in 1997, when he made a public speech in the southeastern province of Siirt denouncing the closure of his party and recited these lines of a poem from the Turkish War of Liberation: \u201cThe mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The judges considered this speech an attack on the regime and sentenced Erdo\u011fan in September 1998 to a 10-month prison term, of which he served four months. \u201cErdo\u011fan\u2019s political career is over,\u201d some mainstream newspapers wrote at the time. \u201cFrom now on, he can\u2019t even be a local governor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winds of change<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scorning such speculation, Erdo\u011fan became convinced that there was an alliance between the military, the judiciary and the country\u2019s secularist media against him, his party and his values. He believed the press was showing disrespect toward him by insistently referring to him solely by his first name, something it did not do with other politicians.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the post-modern coup, Erdo\u011fan also came to believe that a new political line, different from Erbakan\u2019s age-old anti-Western demagoguery, was needed. This was something he even hinted at in the Siirt speech that netted him a prison term. As part of that speech, Erdo\u011fan also said: \u201cThe Western man has freedom of belief; in Europe, there is respect for worship, for the headscarf. Why is there not in Turkey?\u201d<\/p>\n

This Western-oriented line would be the new vision of Erdo\u011fan and the more open-minded members of the Erbakan movement, such as now-President Abdullah G\u00fcl, who would soon join forces to found a new party. In their vision, authoritarian secularism in Turkey should not be considered an extension of the West, as religious conservatives had done for decades. The West should rather be seen as a way to create a more liberal Turkey that would respect religious liberty as well. Erdo\u011fan had personal reasons to make that choice: He could thus send his veiled daughters, Esra and S\u00fcmeyye, not to Turkish universities, where there is a headscarf ban, but to American ones, where the coverings can be worn.<\/p>\n

Erdo\u011fan and his colleagues thus put European Union membership, and EU-promoted political reforms, at the top of their agenda \u2013 at the expense of being accused of \u201ctreason\u201d by their old comrades who stayed loyal to Erbakan.<\/p>\n

The birth of the AKP<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2001, Erdo\u011fan and G\u00fcl established the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which had many visible differences from its Islamist predecessors. The party chose as its emblem not the Islamic-looking crescent but a modern light bulb, and Erdo\u011fan asserted that the AKP was \u201cnot a political party with a religious axis,\u201d but rather one that could be defined as \u201cconservative.\u201d Its message concentrated on political liberalization and economic growth gave the party a sweeping victory in the general elections of November 2002.<\/p>\n

Even though his party won the elections, Erdo\u011fan could not became prime minister right away, as he was still banned from politics by the judiciary for his speech in Siirt, and G\u00fcl thus became the prime minister instead. In December 2002 the Supreme Election Board canceled the general election results from Siirt due to voting irregularities and scheduled a new election for Feb. 9, 2003. By this time, party leader Erdo\u011fan was able to run for Parliament thanks to a legal change made possible by the opposition Republican People\u2019s Party, or CHP, and its former leader, Deniz Baykal. The AKP duly listed Erdo\u011fan as a candidate for the rescheduled Siirt election, and he won, becoming prime minister after G\u00fcl subsequently handed over the post.<\/p>\n

Only four years had passed since newspapers declared Erdo\u011fan could not \u201ceven be a local governor.\u201d Instead, he was destined to become one of the strongest Turkish prime ministers ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even the most dedicated opponents of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan admit he is charismatic, determined and successful \u2013 and perhaps quite lucky as well. Likely the most popular Turkish political leader since Adnan Menderes, the prime minister from 1950 to 1960 before he was executed by a military junta, Erdo\u011fan also has millions of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":24552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}