Erdoğan was born in Beyoğlu, Istanbul, and studied at the Aksaray Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences, before working as a consultant and senior manager in the private sector. Becoming active in local politics, he was elected Welfare Party's Beyoğlu district chair in 1984 and Istanbul chair in 1985. Following the 1994 local elections, Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul.
In 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred and banned from politics after reciting a poem by Ziya Gökalp that compared mosques to barracks and the faithful to an army. Erdoğan was released from prison in 1999 and formed the AKP, abandoning openly Islamist policies.
Erdoğan led the AKP to a landslide victory in the election for the Grand National Assembly in 2002, and became prime minister after winning a by-election in Siirt in 2003. Erdoğan led the AKP to two more election victories in 2007 and 2011. His tenure consisted of economic recovery from the economic crisis of 2001, the start of EU membership negotiations, and the reduction of military influence on politics.
In late 2012, his government began peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to end the Kurdish–Turkish conflict, negotiations which ended three years later.
In 2014, Erdoğan became the country's first directly elected president. Erdoğan's presidency has been marked by democratic backsliding and a shift towards authoritarianism. His economic policies have led to high inflation and the depreciation of the Turkish lira. He has intervened in conflicts in Syria and Libya, launched operations against the Islamic State, Syrian Democratic Forces, and Ba'athist Syria, and has made threats against Greece and Israel.
He oversaw the transformation of Turkey's parliamentary system into a presidential system, introducing term limits and expanding executive powers, and Turkey's migrant crisis. In May 2022, Erdoğan temporarily blocked Finland and Sweden from joining NATO. Erdoğan responded to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine by closing the Bosphorus to Russian naval reinforcements, brokering a deal between Russia and Ukraine regarding the export of grain, and mediating a prisoner exchange.
In 2025, Erdoğan oversaw the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and his subsequent disqualification from the upcoming 2028 presidential election, for which he was considered the opposition front-runner, leading to ongoing widespread protests.
Early life and education
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was born on 26 February 1954 in Kasımpaşa, Beyoğlu to a modest conservative Muslim family. Erdoğan's family is originally from Adjara, a region in Georgia. Although Erdoğan was reported to have said in 2003 that he was of Georgian origin and that his origins were in Batumi, he later denied this. His parents were Ahmet Erdoğan (1905–1988), a coastguard and sea captain, and Tenzile Erdoğan (née Mutlu; 1924–2011).
While Erdoğan attended school in Istanbul, his summer holidays were mostly spent in Güneysu, Rize, where his family originates from. Throughout his life he often returned to this spiritual home, and in 2015 he opened a vast mosque on a mountaintop near this village. The family returned to Istanbul when Erdoğan was 13 years old.
As a teenager, Erdoğan's father provided him with a weekly allowance of 2.5 Turkish lira, less than a dollar. With it, Erdoğan bought postcards and resold them on the street. He sold bottles of water to drivers stuck in traffic. Erdoğan also worked as a street vendor selling simit (sesame bread rings), wearing a white gown and selling the simit from a red three-wheel cart with the rolls stacked behind glass.
In his youth, Erdoğan played semi-professional football in Camialtıspor FC, a local club. The stadium of the local football club in the district where he grew up, Kasımpaşa S.K. is named after him.
Erdoğan is a member of the Community of İskenderpaşa, a Turkish Sufistic community of the Naqshbandi Order.
Education
Erdoğan graduated from Kasımpaşa Piyale Primary School in 1965, and the Istanbul İmam Hatip High School, a religious vocational high school, in 1973. The same educational path was followed by other co-founders of the AK Party. One quarter of the curriculum of İmam Hatip schools involves study of the Quran, the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and the Arabic language.
Erdoğan studied the Quran at the İmam Hatip, where his classmates began calling him hoca ("teacher" or "religious official").
Erdoğan attended a meeting of the nationalist student group National Turkish Student Union (Milli Türk Talebe Birliği), who sought to raise a conservative cohort of young people to counter the rising movement of leftists in Turkey. Within the group, Erdoğan was distinguished by his oratorical skills, developing a penchant for public speaking and excelling in front of an audience.
He won first place in a poetry-reading competition organized by the Community of Turkish Technical Painters, and began preparing for speeches through reading and research. Erdoğan would later comment on these competitions as "enhancing our courage to speak in front of the masses".
Erdoğan wanted to pursue advanced studies at the Ankara University Faculty of Political Science, commonly known as Mülkiye, but only students with regular high school diplomas were eligible to apply, thereby excluding Imam Hatip graduates. Mülkiye was known for its political science department, which trained many statesmen and politicians in Turkey.
Erdoğan was then admitted to Eyüp High School, a regular state school. That he eventually received a high school diploma from this school is a subject of debate.
According to his official biography, Erdoğan subsequently studied business administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences (Turkish: Aksaray İktisat ve Ticaret Yüksekokulu), now known as Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. Both the authenticity and status of his degree have been the subject of disputes and controversy over whether the diploma is legitimate and ought to be considered sufficient to make him eligible as a candidate for the presidency.
Early political career
In 1976, Erdoğan engaged in politics by joining the National Turkish Student Union, an anti-communist action group. In the same year, he became head of the Beyoğlu youth branch of the Islamist National Salvation Party (MSP), and was later promoted to chair of the Istanbul youth branch. He held this position until the 1980 military coup which dissolved all major political parties. He went on to be a consultant and senior executive in the private sector in the aftermath of the coup.
Three years later, in 1983, Erdoğan followed most of Necmettin Erbakan's followers into the newly founded Welfare Party (RP). The new party, like its predecessors subscribed to Erbakan's strain of Islamism, the National view. He became the party's Beyoğlu district chair in 1984, and head of its Istanbul branch in 1985.
Erdoğan entered the parliamentary by-elections of 1986 as a candidate in Istanbul's 6th electoral district, but failed to get elected. Three years later, Erdoğan ran for the district mayoralty of Beyoğlu, finishing in second place with 22.8% of the vote.
In the 1991 general election, the Welfare Party more than doubled its share of the vote in Istanbul compared to four years prior, reaching 16.7%. At first, Erdoğan, who led his party's district list, was thought to have been elected to parliament. However, as a product of the open-list proportional representation system adopted during the previous term, after all votes expressing a candidate preference were tabulated, it was instead Mustafa Baş who earned the seat allocated to the Welfare Party. A difference of about 4,000 preferential votes separated the two, with Baş's ~13,000 to Erdoğan's ~9,000.
Mayor of Istanbul (1994–1998)
In the local elections of 1994, Erdoğan ran as a candidate for Mayor of Istanbul. He was a young, dark horse candidate in a crowded field. Over the course of the campaign, he was mocked by the mainstream media and treated as a country bumpkin by his opponents. In an upset, he won with 25.19% of the popular vote, making it the first time a mayor of Istanbul got elected from his political party.
His win coincided with a wave of Welfare Party victories nationwide, as they won 28 provincial mayoralties - most out of any party - and numerous metropolitan seats, including the capital, Ankara. He said at the time: "Democracy is like a train: when we reach our destination, we get off".
Erdoğan governed pragmatically, focusing on bread-and-butter issues. He aimed to tackle the chronic problems plaguing the metropolis, such as water shortage, pollution – waste collection issues in particular – and severely congested traffic. He undertook an infrastructure overhaul: expanding and modernizing the water grid with hundreds of kilometres of new water pipes being laid, and constructing more than fifty bridges, viaducts, and stretches of highway to mitigate traffic.
State-of-the-art recycling facilities were built and air pollution was reduced through a plan to switch to natural gas. He changed the public buses to environmentally friendly ones. He took precautions to prevent corruption, using measures to ensure that municipal funds were used prudently. He paid back a major portion of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's two-billion-dollar debt and invested four billion dollars in the city.
He also opened up City Hall to the people, gave out his e-mail address and established municipal hot lines.
Erdoğan initiated the first roundtable of mayors during the Istanbul conference, which led to a global, organized movement of mayors. A seven-member international jury from the United Nations unanimously awarded Erdoğan the UN-Habitat award.
Imprisonment
In December 1997 in Siirt, Erdoğan recited a modified version of the "Soldier's prayer" poem written by Ziya Gökalp, a pan-Turkish activist of the early 20th century. This version included an additional stanza in the beginning, its first two verses reading "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets / The minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...." Under article 312/2 of the Turkish penal code his recitation was regarded by the judge as an incitement to violence and religious or racial hatred.
In his defence, Erdoğan said that the poem was published in state-approved books. How this version of the poem ended up in a book published by the Turkish Standards Institution remained a topic of discussion.
Erdoğan was given a ten-month prison sentence. He was forced to give up his mayoral position due to his conviction. The conviction also stipulated a political ban, which prevented him from participating in elections. He had appealed for the sentence to be converted to a monetary fine, but it was reduced to four months instead (24 March 1999 to 27 July 1999).
He was transferred to Pınarhisar prison in Kırklareli. The day Erdoğan went to prison, he released an album called This Song Doesn't End Here. The album features a tracklist of seven poems and became the best-selling album of Turkey in 1999, selling over one million copies. After his release, Erdoğan sought refuge in Tetovo, Macedonia with an ethnic Albanian family with whom he stayed with for several months.
In 2013, Erdoğan visited the Pınarhisar prison again for the first time in fourteen years. After the visit, he said "For me, Pınarhisar is a symbol of rebirth, where we prepared the establishment of the Justice and Development Party".
Justice and Development Party
Erdoğan was member of political parties that kept getting banned by the army or judges. Within his Virtue Party, there was a dispute about the appropriate discourse of the party between traditional politicians and pro-reform politicians. The latter envisioned a party that could operate within the limits of the system, and thus not getting banned as its predecessors like National Order Party, National Salvation Party and Welfare Party.
They wanted to give the group the character of an ordinary conservative party with its members being Muslim Democrats following the example of the Europe's Christian Democrats.
When the Virtue Party was also banned in 2001, a definitive split took place: the followers of Necmettin Erbakan founded the Felicity Party (SP) and the reformers founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) under the leadership of Abdullah Gül and Erdoğan. The pro-reform politicians realized that a strictly Islamic party would never be accepted as a governing party by the state apparatus and they believed that an Islamic party did not appeal to more than about 20 percent of the Turkish electorate.
The AK party emphatically placed itself as a broad democratic conservative party with new politicians from the political centre (like Ali Babacan and Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu), while respecting Islamic norms and values, but without an explicit religious program. This turned out to be successful as the new party won 34% of the vote in the general elections of 2002. Erdoğan became prime minister in March 2003 after the Gül government ended his political ban.
Premiership (2003–2014)
General elections
The elections of 2002 were the first elections in which Erdoğan participated as a party leader. All parties previously elected to parliament failed to win enough votes to re-enter the parliament. The AKP won 34.3% of the national vote and formed the new government. Turkish stocks rose more than 7% on Monday morning. Politicians of the previous generation, such as Ecevit, Bahceli, Yılmaz and Çiller, resigned.
The second largest party, the CHP, received 19.4% of the votes. The AKP won a landslide victory in the parliament, taking nearly two-thirds of the seats. Erdoğan could not become Prime Minister as he was still banned from politics by the judiciary for his speech in Siirt. Gül became the prime minister instead. In December 2002, the Supreme Election Board cancelled the general election results from Siirt due to voting irregularities and scheduled a new election for 9 February 2003.
By this time, party leader Erdoğan was able to run for parliament due to a legal change made possible by the opposition Republican People's Party. The AKP duly listed Erdoğan as a candidate for the rescheduled election, which he won, becoming Prime Minister after Gül handed over the post.
On 14 April 2007, an estimated 300,000 people marched in Ankara to protest against the possible candidacy of Erdoğan in the 2007 presidential election, afraid that if elected as president, he would alter the secular nature of the Turkish state. Erdoğan announced on 24 April 2007 that the party had nominated Abdullah Gül as the AKP candidate in the presidential election.
The protests continued over the next several weeks, with over one million people reported to have turned out at a 29 April rally in Istanbul, tens of thousands at separate protests on 4 May in Manisa and Çanakkale, and one million in İzmir on 13 May.
The stage of the elections of 2007 was set for a fight for legitimacy in the eyes of voters between his government and the CHP. Erdoğan used the event that took place during the ill-fated Presidential elections a few months earlier as a part of the general election campaign of his party. On 22 July 2007, the AKP won an important victory over the opposition, garnering 46.7% of the popular vote. 22 July elections marked only the second time in the Republic of Turkey's history whereby an incumbent governing party won an election by increasing its share of popular support.
On 14 March 2008, Turkey's Chief Prosecutor asked the country's Constitutional Court to ban Erdoğan's governing party. The party escaped a ban on 30 July 2008, a year after winning 46.7% of the vote in national elections, although judges did cut the party's public funding by 50%.
In the June 2011 elections, Erdoğan's governing party won 327 seats (49.83% of the popular vote) making Erdoğan the only prime minister in Turkey's history to win three consecutive general elections, each time receiving more votes than the previous election. The second party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), received 135 seats (25.94%), the nationalist MHP received 53 seats (13.01%), and the Independents received 35 seats (6.58%).
A US$100 billion corruption scandal in 2013 led to the arrests of Erdoğan's close allies, and incriminated Erdoğan.
Referendums
After the opposition parties deadlocked the 2007 presidential election by boycotting the parliament, the ruling AKP proposed a constitutional reform package. The reform package was first vetoed by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Then he applied to the Turkish constitutional court about the reform package, because the president is unable to veto amendments for the second time.
The Turkish constitutional court did not find any problems in the packet and 68.95% of the voters supported the constitutional changes. The reforms consisted of electing the president by popular vote instead of by parliament; reducing the presidential term from seven years to five; allowing the president to stand for re-election for a second term; holding general elections every four years instead of five; and reducing from 367 to 184 the quorum of lawmakers needed for parliamentary decisions.
Reforming the Constitution was one of the main pledges of the AKP during the 2007 election campaign. The main opposition party CHP was not interested in altering the Constitution on a big scale, making it impossible to form a Constitutional Commission (Anayasa Uzlaşma Komisyonu). The amendments lacked the two-thirds majority needed to become law instantly, but secured 336 votes in the 550-seat parliament – enough to put the proposals to a referendum.
The reform package included a number of issues such as the right of individuals to appeal to the highest court, the creation of the ombudsman's office; the possibility to negotiate a nationwide labour contract; gender equality; the ability of civilian courts to convict members of the military; the right of civil servants to go on strike; a privacy law; and the structure of the Constitutional Court. The referendum was agreed by a majority of 58%.
Domestic policy
Kurdish issue
In 2009, Prime Minister Erdoğan's government announced a plan to help end the quarter-century-long Turkey–Kurdistan Workers' Party conflict that had cost more than 40,000 lives. The government's plan, supported by the European Union, intended to allow the Kurdish language to be used in all broadcast media and political campaigns, and restored Kurdish names to cities and 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." Erdoğan passed a partial amnesty to reduce penalties faced by many members of the Kurdish guerrilla movement PKK who had surrendered to the government. On 23 November 2011, during a televised meeting of his party in Ankara, he apologized on behalf of the state for the Dersim massacre, where many Alevis and Zazas were killed.
In 2013 the government of Erdoğan began a peace process between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish Government, mediated by parliamentarians of the Peoples' Democratic party (HDP).
In 2015, following AKP electoral defeat, the rise of a social democrat, pro-Kurdish rights opposition party, and the minor Ceylanpınar incident, he decided that the peace process was over and supported the revocation of the parliamentary immunity of the HDP parliamentarians. Violent confrontation resumed in 2015–2017, mainly in the South East of Turkey, resulting in higher death tolls and several external operations on the part of the Turkish military.
Representatives and elected HDP have been systematically arrested, removed, and replaced in their offices, this tendency being confirmed after the 2016 Turkish coup attempt and the following purges. Six thousand additional deaths occurred in Turkey alone for 2015–2022. Yet, as of 2022 the intensity of the PKK-Turkey conflict did decrease in recent years.
In the previous decade, Erdoğan and the AKP government used anti-PKK, martial rhetoric and external operations to raise Turkish nationalist votes before elections.
Human rights
During Erdoğan's time as prime minister, the far-reaching powers of the 1991 Anti-Terror Law were reduced. In 2004, the death penalty was abolished for all circumstances. The Democratic initiative process was initiated, with the goal to improve democratic standards in general and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in particular.
In 2012, the Human Rights and Equality Institution of Turkey and the Ombudsman Institution were established. The UN Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture was ratified. Children are no longer prosecuted under terrorism legislation. The Jewish community were allowed to celebrate Hanukkah publicly for the first time in modern Turkish history in 2015.
The Turkish government approved a law in 2008 to return properties confiscated in the past by the state to non-Muslim foundations. It also paved the way for the free allocation of worship places such as synagogues and churches to non-Muslim foundations. However, European officials noted a return to more authoritarian ways after the stalling of Turkey's bid to join the European Union notably on freedom of speech, freedom of the press and Kurdish minority rights. Demands by activists for the recognition of LGBTQ rights were publicly rejected by government members.