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Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born February 26, 1954) became prime minister of Turkey on March 14, 2003. He is the leader of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AK Party, or Justice
and Development Party).
Erdoğan, a native of Istanbul, was a member of the now-defunct Islamist
Welfare Party during the 1980s.
He was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, where he made a name for himself as a populist,
effective administrator, building up Istanbul's infrastructure and transportation grid, while simultaneously beautifying the
city. He was tried and convicted of inciting religious hatred in 1998 based on a public
reading of one of the poems of Ziya Gökalp. Once released from jail, he
founded the Justice and Development Party, which is based on a more moderate version of the Welfare Party's Islamic fundamentalism. It subsequently took 34.3% of the vote
in the 2002 parliamentary elections, and due to Turkey's system of allotting seats, won a
majority in parliament.
Erdoğan's appointment as Prime Minister was delayed after his party's victory in the elections for legal reasons. The
prime minister in Turkey must be a member of parliament and the constitution excluded those with previous convictions from
standing. A prominent supporter of Erdoğan, Abdullah Gül, became a
stand-in prime minister and pushed through a constitutional amendment that allowed Erdoğan to win a freshly vacant seat in
the province of Siirt in a by-election. Gül
resigned (to become foreign minister) and Erdoğan was appointed Prime Minister by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.
Erdoğan has since provoked some tension with the country's powerful and staunchly secular military by pursuing what it
perceives as an Islamist agenda. His distrust for the military has however led to a
thawing of relations with Greece, as he has little sympathy for its staunch
nationalism, and little interest in maintaining a hard line on Turkish control of Northern Cyprus, preferring instead to focus on domestic issues and on improving foreign relations. In
May 2004, he became the first Turkish prime minister to visit Greece since 1988, and the first to visit the Turkish minority of Thrace since 1952. The visit was remarkably congenial on both sides, and
Erdoğan scored an important victory when his Greek counterpart, Costas Caramanlis, declared that Greece would support a Turkish bid for European Union membership, a major aim of Erdoğan's administration.
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