Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has governed Turkey first as prime minister and then as president, once compared democracy to a train. In 1994, newly elected as mayor of Istanbul, he said: "Democracy is like a train: when we reach our destination, we get off".

  That sentence has outlived the moment it was spoken in. What destination did he have in mind? Who would still be on board when the train stopped? And how did a politician who was pushed out of public life return to lead the country?

  This documentary follows one career through street stalls, prison cells, election nights and palaces. It asks what his supporters say he built, and what his opponents say was lost along the way. It also asks how one politician could gather devoted admirers and fierce critics at the same time.

  37383913

• 2. Kasımpaşa Beginnings

  ›

  On the 26th of February 1954, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was born in Kasımpaşa, a district of Beyoğlu in Istanbul. His family was modest and conservative. His father, Ahmet Erdoğan, was a coastguard and sea captain, and his mother was Tenzile. The family's roots lie in Adjara, a region of Georgia. In 2003 Erdoğan was reported to have said his origins were in Batumi, but he later denied it.

  Summers belonged to Güneysu, in Rize, where the family originates. Erdoğan kept returning to this spiritual home. In 2015 he opened a vast mosque on a mountaintop near the village. The family moved back to Istanbul when he was 13 years old.

  A weekly allowance of 2.5 Turkish lira, less than a dollar, came from his father in those teenage years. Erdoğan put it to work. He bought postcards and resold them on the street, and he sold bottles of water to drivers stuck in traffic. He also sold simit, the sesame bread rings, wearing a white gown and standing beside a red three-wheel cart with the rolls stacked behind glass.

  Football came too. In his youth he played semi-professional football for Camialtıspor FC, a local club. The stadium of Kasımpaşa S.K., the club of the district where he grew up, is named after him. He is also a member of the Community of İskenderpaşa, a Sufi community of the Naqshbandi Order.

  Erdoğan finished Kasımpaşa Piyale Primary School in 1965. In 1973 he graduated from the Istanbul İmam Hatip High School, a religious vocational school. A quarter of its curriculum covers the Quran, the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the Arabic language. Other future co-founders of his party followed the same path. His classmates began calling him hoca, a word for a teacher or religious official.

  Outside class, he attended a meeting of the National Turkish Student Union. The group wanted to raise a conservative generation to counter the rising movement of leftists. There his speaking stood out. He won first place in a poetry-reading competition run by the Community of Turkish Technical Painters, and he prepared for speeches by reading and research. He later said such contests were "enhancing our courage to speak in front of the masses".

  His next ambition hit a wall. Ankara University's Faculty of Political Science, known as Mülkiye, had trained many of Turkey's statesmen. Erdoğan wanted to study there. Only holders of regular high school diplomas could apply, and that excluded İmam Hatip graduates. He was admitted to Eyüp High School, a regular state school, though whether he received its diploma is debated.

  His official biography says he then studied business administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences, now part of Marmara University. Both the authenticity and the status of that degree have been disputed. The argument reaches a practical question: whether the diploma is enough to make him eligible to run for the presidency.

  56101117

• 3. Mayor and Prisoner

  ›

  About 4,000 preferential votes decided Erdoğan's first serious bid for parliament in the 1991 general election. He led the Welfare Party's district list in Istanbul and was at first thought elected. Then the open-list system counted every preference for individual candidates. Mustafa Baş took the seat with about 13,000 votes to Erdoğan's about 9,000.

  His road to that near miss began in 1976. He joined the anti-communist National Turkish Student Union and became head of the Beyoğlu youth branch of the Islamist National Salvation Party. Later he chaired its Istanbul youth branch. That lasted until the 1980 military coup, which dissolved all major political parties. He turned to the private sector as a consultant and senior executive.

  In 1983 he followed most of Necmettin Erbakan's supporters into the newly founded Welfare Party. It kept Erbakan's strain of Islamism, known as the National view. Erdoğan became its Beyoğlu district chair in 1984 and head of its Istanbul branch in 1985. He lost a parliamentary by-election in Istanbul's 6th district in 1986. In 1989 he finished second in the race for Beyoğlu mayor, with 22.8% of the vote. By 1991 the party's Istanbul vote had more than doubled from four years earlier, reaching 16.7%.

  The 1994 local elections made him mayor of Istanbul. He was a young dark horse in a crowded field. The mainstream media mocked him, and his opponents treated him as a country bumpkin. He won with 25.19% of the vote, the first time a mayor of Istanbul had come from his party. The Welfare Party also took 28 provincial mayoralties, the most of any party, including the capital, Ankara.

  Erdoğan governed pragmatically and went after bread-and-butter problems. Istanbul suffered from water shortages, pollution, waste collection failures and severe traffic. His administration laid hundreds of kilometers of new water pipes and built more than fifty bridges, viaducts and stretches of highway. It opened recycling facilities, planned a switch to natural gas to cut air pollution, and replaced public buses with environmentally friendly ones.

  He also took steps against corruption to make sure municipal funds were used prudently. He paid back a major portion of the city's two-billion-dollar debt and invested four billion dollars. He opened City Hall to residents, gave out his e-mail address and set up municipal hot lines. A seven-member international jury from the United Nations unanimously awarded him the UN-Habitat award. He also started the first roundtable of mayors at the Istanbul conference, which led to a global, organized movement of mayors.

  In December 1997, in Siirt, Erdoğan recited a modified version of the "Soldier's prayer", a poem by Ziya Gökalp, a pan-Turkish activist of the early twentieth century. The version he read had an extra opening stanza. Its first two verses ran: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets / The minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...."

  A judge applied article 312/2 of the Turkish penal code and treated the recitation as incitement to violence and to religious or racial hatred. Erdoğan replied that the poem had appeared in state-approved books. How this version ended up in a book from the Turkish Standards Institution stayed a subject of discussion.

  The sentence was ten months. It forced him out of the mayor's office and came with a ban on taking part in elections. He appealed for a fine instead, but the term was cut to four months, served from the 24th of March 1999 to the 27th of July 1999. He was held at Pınarhisar prison in Kırklareli.

  On the day he went to prison, he released an album called This Song Doesn't End Here. It carried seven poems. It became the best-selling album in Turkey in 1999, selling over one million copies. After his release he stayed for several months in Tetovo, Macedonia, with an ethnic Albanian family.

  In 2013 he went back to Pınarhisar for the first time in fourteen years. Afterward he said: "For me, Pınarhisar is a symbol of rebirth, where we prepared the establishment of the Justice and Development Party".

  3641444540

• 4. A Party Built to Survive

  ›

  The Virtue Party was banned in 2001. It followed the National Order Party, the National Salvation Party and the Welfare Party, all of which had been shut down by the army or the judges. Inside Virtue, traditional politicians and pro-reform politicians had been arguing over how the party should speak. The reformers wanted a party that could work within the limits of the system and survive. They pictured Muslim Democrats, modeled on Europe's Christian Democrats.

  The ban made the split final. Followers of Necmettin Erbakan founded the Felicity Party. The reformers founded the Justice and Development Party, the AKP, under the leadership of Abdullah Gül and Erdoğan. They had concluded that the state apparatus would never accept a strictly Islamic party as a governing party. They also believed such a party would appeal to no more than about 20 percent of voters.

  So the AKP presented itself as a broad democratic conservative party. It brought in politicians from the political center, such as Ali Babacan and Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, and respected Islamic norms and values without an explicit religious program. In the general elections of 2002, the first in which Erdoğan took part as a party leader, it won 34.3% of the vote.

  Every party previously elected to parliament failed to win enough votes to re-enter it. The Republican People's Party came second with 19.4%. The AKP took nearly two-thirds of the seats, Turkish stocks rose more than 7% on Monday morning, and veterans such as Ecevit, Bahceli, Yılmaz and Çiller resigned.

  Erdoğan still could not be prime minister, because the judiciary's ban for the Siirt speech remained. Abdullah Gül took the post instead. In December 2002 the Supreme Election Board canceled the Siirt results over voting irregularities and set a new election for the 9th of February 2003. A legal change, made possible by the opposition Republican People's Party, let Erdoğan run. He won, Gül handed over the premiership, and Erdoğan became the 25th prime minister in March 2003.

  The tests came quickly. In May 2007 the head of Turkey's High Court asked prosecutors to consider charging Erdoğan over his comments on the presidential election. The Constitutional Court had invalidated a presidential vote because an opposition boycott left parliament without a quorum. Erdoğan called the ruling "a disgrace to the justice system". Prosecutors also looked at his earlier remark that the court had fired a "bullet at democracy". Tülay Tuğcu, head of the Constitutional Court, condemned his "threats, insults and hostility" toward the justice system.

  A year earlier, in March 2006, the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors had held a press conference of its own. It protested that the appointment of judges to the high courts had been obstructed for over 10 months. The board said Erdoğan wanted to fill the posts with his own appointees. Erdoğan answered that the constitution gave that power to his elected party.

  On the 14th of April 2007, an estimated 300,000 people marched in Ankara against a possible Erdoğan candidacy for president. They feared he would alter the secular nature of the state. On the 24th of April he announced that the party had nominated Abdullah Gül instead. The protests went on, with over one million reported at an Istanbul rally on the 29th of April and one million in İzmir on the 13th of May.

  The military weighed in with a midnight e-memorandum on its website, objecting to Gül as the candidate. Its argument was that Gül, whose wife wears an Islamic headscarf, could undermine the laicistic order. The government responded harshly and said the military had nothing to do with choosing the party's candidate. Turkey's army had removed elected governments four times before. Under Erdoğan its influence in politics was significantly reduced.

  On the 22nd of July 2007 the AKP won 46.7% of the popular vote. Only once before in the Republic's history had a governing party won an election while increasing its share of support. The celebration was short. On the 14th of March 2008, the Chief Prosecutor asked the Constitutional Court to ban the party. It escaped on the 30th of July 2008, though the judges cut its public funding by 50%.

  After the opposition's boycott deadlocked the presidential vote, the AKP proposed a constitutional package. Its points included electing the president by popular vote instead of by parliament, cutting the presidential term from seven years to five, and allowing a second term. General elections would come every four years instead of five, and the parliamentary quorum would drop from 367 to 184. The package gathered 336 votes in the 550-seat parliament, short of two-thirds but enough to send it to a referendum.

  In June 2011 the AKP won 327 seats with 49.83% of the popular vote. Erdoğan became the only prime minister in Turkish history to win three consecutive general elections, each time with more votes than the last. The Republican People's Party took 135 seats with 25.94%.

  Then the ground shifted. A corruption scandal worth US$100 billion in 2013 led to the arrest of Erdoğan's close allies and incriminated Erdoğan himself. The same year, a small sit-in to defend a city park in Istanbul grew into the Gezi Park protests. Police answered with tear gas, and the protests grew each day. It was the largest mass protest in a decade.

  In a televised speech Erdoğan said: "The police were there yesterday, they are there today, and they will be there tomorrow". After weeks of clashes, his government first apologized to the protestors and called for a plebiscite. Then it ordered a crackdown.

  4748515557

• 5. Building and Counting

  ›

  Turkey owed the International Monetary Fund $23.5 billion when Erdoğan's government inherited the economy in 2002. By 2012 the figure was $0.9 billion. Since 1961 Turkey had signed 19 IMF loan accords. His government met the budget and market requirements and received every installment, the only Turkish government ever to do so. He then declined a new deal and announced that the IMF could borrow from Turkey.

  The economy he took over was already recovering from a recession, thanks to reforms by Kemal Derviş. Erdoğan backed Finance Minister Ali Babacan's macro-economic policies, tried to attract foreign investors and lifted many regulations. Between 2002 and 2012 real GDP grew by 64% and GDP per capita by 43%. Annual growth in GDP per capita averaged 3.6%. Larger numbers were often advertised, but they ignored the inflation of the US dollar over the period.

  The central bank's reserves rose from $26.5 billion in 2002 to $92.2 billion in 2011. Inflation fell from 32% to 9.0% in 2004, though it kept fluctuating around 9%, still among the highest in the world. Public debt fell from 74% of GDP in 2002 to 39% in 2009. In 2010, five-year credit default swaps on Turkish sovereign debt traded at a record low of 1.17%.

  There was a price. The current account deficit widened from US$600 million to an estimated US$58 billion in 2013. Turkey's rank among world economies by GDP moved only from 17 to 16.

  In 2003 the government pushed through the Labor Act, a sweeping reform of Turkey's labor laws. It set a 45-hour workweek and limited overtime to 270 hours a year. It protected workers from discrimination based on sex, religion or political affiliation. It barred discrimination between permanent and temporary workers, entitled people dismissed without valid cause to compensation, and required written contracts for jobs lasting a year or more.

  The education budget rose from 7.5 billion lira in 2002 to 34 billion lira in 2011. That was the highest share of the national budget for any ministry, displacing the military, which had held the top share before. Compulsory schooling grew from eight years to twelve. In 2003, together with UNICEF, the government launched a campaign called "Come on girls, let's go to school!" to close the gender gap in primary enrollment, especially in southeast Turkey.

  Textbooks became free in 2004, and since 2008 every province has had its own university. The number of universities nearly doubled, from 98 in 2002 to 186 in October 2012. Under the Fatih project, state schools received a total of 620,000 smart boards. Tablet computers went to 17 million students and about one million teachers and administrators. In June 2017, however, Erdoğan approved a school curriculum proposal that dropped the theory of evolution by 2019, postponing it to undergraduate level.

  Roads and rails changed the map. Airports grew from 26 to 50 in ten years. From the founding of the Republic in 1923 to 2002, Turkey had built 6,000 km of dual carriageway. Between 2002 and 2011 it added another 13,500 km of expressway, and motor accidents fell by 50 percent. High-speed train service began in 2009, the first in Turkish history.

  In eight years, 1,076 km of railway were built and 5,449 km renewed. Marmaray, an undersea rail tunnel beneath the Bosphorus, was started in 2004. It opened on the 29th of October 2013, the 90th anniversary of the Republic. The Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, the third bridge over the Bosphorus, was inaugurated on the 26th of August 2016.

  Health care got its own overhaul, the Health Transformation Program, launched after the government took power in 2003. It expanded the Green Card program, which gives health benefits to the poor, in 2004. It also aimed to raise the ratio of private to state-run care, and long queues in public hospitals fed the growth of private medicine.

  In April 2006 Erdoğan unveiled a social security package demanded by the IMF under a loan deal, one he called among the most radical reforms ever. It passed over fierce opposition. Three social security bodies were merged into one, and everyone under 18 became entitled to free health services. The retirement age would start rising in 2036, reaching 65 by 2048 for women and men alike.

  Erdoğan is outspokenly anti-smoking. In January 2008 parliament adopted a law prohibiting smoking in most public places. His government also tightened rules on alcohol, banning all advertising and raising the tax on alcoholic drinks.

  659991100

• 6. Old Wounds

  ›

  In 2009 Prime Minister Erdoğan's government announced a plan to help end a conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, that had run for a quarter of a century and cost more than 40,000 lives. The European Union supported the plan. It would allow the Kurdish language in all broadcast media and political campaigns, and restore Kurdish names to towns that had been given Turkish ones. Erdoğan said: "We took a courageous step to resolve chronic issues that constitute an obstacle along Turkey's development, progression and empowerment."

  A partial amnesty reduced penalties for many PKK fighters who surrendered. On the 23rd of November 2011, at a televised party meeting in Ankara, Erdoğan apologized on behalf of the state for the Dersim massacre, in which many Alevis and Zazas were killed. In 2013 his government began a peace process with the PKK, mediated by parliamentarians of the Peoples' Democratic Party, the HDP.

  It did not last. In 2015 the AKP suffered an electoral defeat, a pro-Kurdish-rights party on the social democratic side rose, and the minor Ceylanpınar incident occurred. Erdoğan decided the process was over and backed lifting the parliamentary immunity of HDP members. Violent confrontation returned from 2015 to 2017, mainly in the southeast, with higher death tolls and several Turkish military operations beyond the border.

  Elected HDP representatives were arrested, removed and replaced, a trend that continued after the 2016 coup attempt. Six thousand additional deaths occurred in Turkey alone between 2015 and 2022, though the conflict's intensity had fallen by 2022. In the decade before, Erdoğan and the AKP used martial anti-PKK rhetoric and external operations to raise nationalist votes before elections.

  On the killings of Armenians during the First World War, Erdoğan continued Turkey's policy of denying that they were a genocide. He said Turkey would consider the term only after a thorough investigation by a joint Turkish-Armenian commission of historians, archaeologists, political scientists and other experts. In 2005 he and the opposition leader Deniz Baykal wrote to Armenian President Robert Kocharyan proposing such a commission. Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian rejected the offer as "insincere and not serious".

  In December 2008, Erdoğan answered the "I Apologize" campaign by Turkish intellectuals: "We did not commit a crime, therefore we do not need to apologise." In 2011 he ordered the demolition of the Monument to Humanity in Kars, a 33-meter Turkish-Armenian friendship monument commissioned in 2006. He said it stood offensively close to the tomb of an 11th-century Islamic scholar and that its shadow ruined the view. Kars municipality officials said it had been built illegally in a protected area.

  The former mayor who approved the monument said the municipality was destroying not just a "monument to humanity" but "humanity itself". Turkish artists opposed the demolition. Two of them, the painter Bedri Baykam and Tugba Kurtulmus, the general coordinator of Pyramid Art Gallery, were stabbed after a meeting at the Akatlar cultural center in Istanbul.

  On the 23rd of April 2014, Erdoğan's office issued a statement in nine languages, including two dialects of Armenian. It offered condolences for the mass killings, said the events of 1915 had inhumane consequences, and called it shared pain. A year later, in April 2015, Pope Francis described atrocities against Armenian civilians as "the first genocide of the 20th century". Erdoğan recalled Turkey's ambassador from the Vatican and summoned the Vatican's ambassador to express disappointment.

  In April 2021 US President Joe Biden formally recognized the Armenian genocide. Erdoğan called the move "groundless", "unfair" and "destructive". He accused Biden of bowing to pressure from radical Armenian groups and cited the destruction of Native American peoples by the United States to charge hypocrisy.

  The record on rights is mixed. Under Erdoğan, the far-reaching powers of the 1991 Anti-Terror Law were reduced, and in 2004 the death penalty was abolished in all circumstances. The Human Rights and Equality Institution of Turkey and the Ombudsman Institution were established in 2012. In 2015 the Jewish community was allowed to celebrate Hanukkah publicly for the first time in modern Turkish history.

  A 2008 law returned property once confiscated by the state to non-Muslim foundations. In 2011, reforms returned properties of Christian and Jewish minorities seized in the 1930s, with a total value reaching $2 billion. Yet European officials noted a return to more authoritarian ways after Turkey's bid to join the European Union stalled, especially on freedom of speech, press freedom and Kurdish minority rights. Government members publicly rejected activists' demands for LGBTQ rights.

  Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey around 100 on its Press Freedom Index during Erdoğan's first term. By 2021 the rank was 153 out of 179 countries. Freedom House gave Turkey a press freedom score of 48/100 in 2006, its low point, and 55/100 in 2012.

  646677477

• 7. Friends and Quarrels

  ›

  "Don't make enemies, make friends" was the slogan behind Turkish foreign policy in Erdoğan's years as prime minister. It was tied to the name of Ahmet Davutoğlu, his chief foreign policy advisor, who became foreign minister in 2009. The aim was "zero problems" with neighbors. Erdoğan also co-founded the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, which seeks international dialogue against extremism.

  Europe came first. On the 3rd of October 2005, negotiations on Turkey's accession to the European Union formally opened. The newspaper European Voice had named Erdoğan "The European of the Year 2004" for his reforms. He said: "Turkey's accession shows that Europe is a continent where civilisations reconcile and not clash." The talks stalled in 2009 and 2010, when Turkish ports were closed to Cypriot ships. Ankara continues to refuse to recognize the Republic of Cyprus.

  In May 2004 Erdoğan became the first Turkish prime minister to visit Greece since 1988. He was also the first to visit the Turkish minority of Thrace since 1952. In 2007 he and Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis inaugurated a Greek-Turkish gas pipeline, which gave Caspian gas its first direct Western outlet. He and his party also strongly backed the EU-supported 2004 referendum to reunify Cyprus.

  Russia warmed too. President Putin visited Turkey in December 2004, and in November 2005 he attended the opening of the jointly built Blue Stream gas pipeline. In May 2010 the two countries signed 17 agreements. They covered Turkey's first nuclear power plant, a planned Black Sea to Mediterranean oil pipeline, and visa-free travel for stays of up to 30 days.

  Washington sent its own signal. When Barack Obama became president, he made Turkey the site of his first overseas bilateral meeting, in April 2009. He said he wanted to make a statement about Turkey's importance, calling it a model partnership between a predominantly Christian nation and a predominantly Muslim one.

  On the 1st of March 2003, the Turkish parliament rejected a motion to let Turkish troops join the US-led invasion of Iraq and to allow foreign troops on Turkish soil for it. Afterward Iraq and Turkey signed 48 trade agreements. Turkey also built ties with Iraqi Kurdistan, opening a Turkish university in Erbil and a consulate in Mosul.

  Relations with Israel ran from warmth to rupture. Erdoğan visited Israel on the 1st of May 2005, unusual for a leader of a Muslim-majority country, and went to Yad Vashem. In 2007 Israeli President Shimon Peres addressed the Turkish parliament. At the 2009 World Economic Forum, over the Gaza War, Erdoğan told Peres: "You are older than I am. Maybe you are feeling guilty and that is why you are raising your voice." When the moderator cut him off, he left the panel.

  The Gaza flotilla raid of May 2010 deepened the break. Erdoğan called it "state terrorism" and demanded an apology. Eight Turks and one Turco-American were killed. In 2011 Turkey ejected Israeli ambassadors and cut off diplomatic relations. In February 2013 Erdoğan called Zionism a "crime against humanity", then retracted it, saying he had been misinterpreted.

  Syria followed an arc from friendship to enmity. In 2004 Bashar al-Assad made the first official visit by a Syrian president to Turkey in 57 years. Visa restrictions were lifted in 2009, which set off an economic boom in border regions. After the conflict broke out in 2011, Erdoğan began backing the Syrian opposition. The result was a serious Syrian refugee problem in Turkey. Today Turkey is the main backer of the transitional Syrian administration led by Ahmed Al-Sharaa.

  Erdoğan made his first official visit to Egypt on the 12th of September 2011, with six ministers and 200 businessmen. Egyptians received him with enthusiasm, and he was honored in Tahrir Square. His 2011 comment that he supported secularism for Egypt angered Islamic movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing. After the Rabaa and al-Nahda sit-in dispersals of the 14th of August 2013, he condemned the killings. In July 2014 he called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi an "illegitimate tyrant".

  Somalia saw a different kind of engagement. During the drought of 2011, Erdoğan's government contributed over $201 million in humanitarian relief. Turkey reopened its embassy in Mogadishu, and Turkish Airlines became the first long-distance international airline in two decades to resume flights there. Turkey also built hospitals and helped renovate the National Assembly building.

  Later years brought a tougher edge. In May 2022 Erdoğan temporarily blocked Finland and Sweden from joining NATO. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he closed the Bosphorus to Russian naval reinforcements, brokered a grain export deal between Russia and Ukraine, and mediated a prisoner exchange. He launched operations against the Islamic State, the Syrian Democratic Forces and Assad's forces, which led to the fall of the Assad regime. He has also made threats against Greece.

  799395

• 8. The Presidency

  ›

  On the 28th of August 2014, Erdoğan took the oath of office as the 12th president of Turkey. Weeks earlier, on the 1st of July, the AKP's deputy leader Mehmet Ali Şahin had announced him as its candidate. Erdoğan introduced a campaign logo at that speech, and critics noted its similarity to the one Barack Obama used in 2008. He won in the first round with 51.79%. Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the joint candidate of the Republican People's Party, the nationalist MHP and 13 other parties, took 38.44%, and the HDP's Selahattin Demirtaş took 9.76%.

  Asked about his lower-than-expected result, Erdoğan allegedly replied: "there were even those who did not like the Prophet. I, however, won 52%". He announced that he would not keep the tradition of presidential neutrality and would use rarely used powers such as calling the cabinet. The opposition argued that new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, sworn in on the 29th of August, would be docile while Erdoğan ran the government.

  His new home drew a storm. The Presidential Complex covers roughly 50 acres of the Atatürk Forest Farm in Ankara, protected land, and several court orders to halt construction were ignored. Critics alleged corruption, wildlife destruction and the obliteration of the farm's zoo. Because the palace is technically illegal, opponents nicknamed it "Kaç-Ak Saray", since kaçak means illegal in Turkish.

  The complex has almost 1,000 rooms and cost $350 million. It was first designed as the Prime Minister's office, but Erdoğan announced it as the presidential palace and gave the Çankaya Mansion to the prime minister. The mansion had been the iconic presidential office since the Republic's start. A reception planned for the 29th of October 2014 to open the palace was cancelled after most invited guests announced a boycott and a mining accident struck Ermenek, in Karaman.

  On the 20th of July 2016, after a coup attempt, Erdoğan declared a state of emergency, first for three months. Parliament approved it, and it was extended until 2018. By March 2018, more than 50,000 people had been arrested and over 160,000 fired from their jobs. After the coup attempt, over 200 journalists were arrested and over 120 media outlets closed. Cumhuriyet journalists were detained in November 2016. Many in the international community complained about the lack of proper judicial process.

  The press had already been squeezed. The newspaper Zaman was seized in March 2016. Former US ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and Eric Edelman wrote in The Washington Post: "Clearly, democracy cannot flourish under Erdoğan now". Reporters Without Borders called Erdoğan an "enemy of press freedom". Turkey temporarily blocked Twitter in 2014. In April 2017 it blocked a major online reference site over a content dispute, a ban that lasted until the 15th of January 2020. In July 2020 Erdoğan announced regulations to control or shut down social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Netflix.

  In January 2016, more than a thousand academics signed a petition criticizing military operations against Kurdish towns in the east, such as Sur, Silvan, Nusaybin, Cizre and Silopi. Erdoğan called the signers "the darkest of people" and accused them of terrorist propaganda. Within days, over 30 were arrested in dawn raids, and nearly half were fired from their jobs, though all were quickly released.

  In April 2017 voters approved 18 amendments replacing the parliamentary system with a presidential one. The office of prime minister would be abolished, and the president would hold broad executive powers. Parliament grew from 550 to 600 seats, and the minimum candidacy age dropped from 25 to 18. On the 27th of April 2018 Erdoğan declared his candidacy for the People's Alliance, backed by the MHP. His main rival, Muharrem İnce of the Republican People's Party, was known for combative speeches. Erdoğan won with 52.59%.

  The 2019 local elections cost the AKP Istanbul and Ankara for the first time in 25 years, along with 5 of Turkey's 6 largest cities. The loss was widely blamed on the economic crisis, rising authoritarianism and the Syrian refugee situation. The Supreme Electoral Council then ordered a new Istanbul election and cancelled Ekrem İmamoğlu's mayoral certificate. In the rerun in June, the AKP lost by a greater margin. Erdoğan had once said that if the party lost Istanbul, it would lose Turkey.

  In 2023, the opposition argued that a third term would violate the constitution because Erdoğan had launched his campaign in June 2022. In the first round he fell short of the required 50% and faced Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in a runoff. On the 28th of May 2023 he won, with 52.18%. On the 8th of March 2024 he declared that he would retire when his term ended in 2028.

  Then came 2025. Erdoğan oversaw the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was then disqualified from the 2028 presidential election. İmamoğlu had been considered the opposition front-runner for that race. The moves set off widespread protests that are still going on.

  42348692