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Sunday’s election in Turkey could decide the political future of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a leader whose decades in power have reshaped Turkey’s politics and role in global affairs.
First as prime minister and then as president, Erdogan has faced moments of uncertainty (he survived a coup attempt in 2016). Over time, however, he has moved toward one-man rule, consolidating power and leveraging Turkey’s international dominance.
A polarizing figure, on Sunday he will face perhaps the most competitive election of his career. He has presided over soaring inflation and in recent months his government has come under intense criticism for its response to earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 in Turkey earlier this year.
While in office, he has deepened restrictions on speech and expression, and under his rule, the judiciary has jailed or brought charges against opponents. Opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, his most prominent rival, has promised an alternative: “Nothing will ever happen to you because you criticize me.”
Here are some of the highlights of Erdogan’s career as a public servant and player on the world stage, charting his path from popular mayor of Istanbul to entrenched one-man rule.
1994: Erdogan, already involved in local politics, runs for mayor of Istanbul, winning with roughly 25% of the vote as a member of the Welfare Party. As mayor, Erdogan focuses on modernizing public goods and services, including through privatization. Among his constituency: rural-to-urban migrants seeking an alternative to the entrenched secular establishment.
1997: Erdogan is accused of inciting religious hatred after reciting a passage from a poem — which includes militant religious imagery: “the minarets are our bayonets” — that violates Turkey’s laws enforcing secularism. As a social conservative in an Islamist political tradition, he seeks to gain more political representation for religious Muslims.
1998: Forced to resign as mayor, Erdogan serves a four-month prison sentence in early 1999, for recitation. His imprisonment only raises his profile.
2001: Erdogan founds the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. He and his allies calculate that a simple Islamist party would not win power in Turkey in the early 2000s. The AKP positions itself as conservative and respectful of Islamic tradition. “I am a Muslim,” Erdogan said TIME magazine in 2002. “But I believe in a secular state”.
2003: Erdogan becomes prime minister after his party wins power in parliament, and some legal changes allow him to serve despite his imprisonment. In this role, and in the context of Turkey’s quest for EU membership, Erdogan’s government is pursuing reforms such as sweeping changes to the penal code, more money for education spending, as well as laws that expand freedom of expression and religion. This is accompanied by a more conservative agenda, including attempts to restrict the sale of alcohol, which Erdogan also pursued as mayor of Istanbul.
2009: President Barack Obama chooses Turkey as the destination for his first bilateral diplomatic trip abroad. His visit affirms the vision of Turkey charting the path to a form of Islamism acceptable to the West and apparently destined for EU membership. “I came here because of my respect for Turkey’s democracy and culture and because of my belief that Turkey has a very important role in the region and in the world,” Obama says. Observations at a student roundtable during that visit, during which he mentioned having “productive” talks with Erdogan.
200s: EU accession talks, which began in 2005, have stalled in recent years, with several world leaders expressing frustration at the pace of negotiations.
2010: Regionally, Erdogan receives praise for his leadership in Turkey during the Arab Spring, when uprisings rocked the Arab world, according to the Brookings Institution. 2011 Arab Public Opinion Survey. Among the 3,000 respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, “Turkey is seen to have played the ‘most constructive’ role in Arab events,” says a Brookings write-up of the results of the poll. Among respondents, the paper says, “those who foresee a new president for Egypt want the new president to be more like Erdogan.”
Around the same time, in late 2010, Erdogan and the AKP win a constitutional referendum that curbs the power of the military and turns the presidential election into a national vote, rather than a parliamentary one.
2013: Mass anti-government protests, sparked by public opposition to an Erdogan-backed construction project in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, mark a turning point in Erdogan’s political career. Activists stage a sit-in, and the ensuing police response spawns a broader movement and, in turn, more widespread repression.
That same year, a wide-ranging corruption scandal implicated AKP members in cases of bribery, money laundering and fraud, leading to the resignation of numerous politicians, including members of Erdogan’s cabinet. Audio recordings leaked via social media also appear to capture Erdogan discussing bribes with his son Erdogan dismisses the tapes as fabrications, part of an international conspiracy to force him from power.
2014: Erdogan becomes president, winning Turkey’s first presidential election based on a national vote.
2016: In March, Erdogan reaches an agreement with the EU, amid a regional migration crisis, allowing people fleeing the West to return to Turkey. The deal “turns Turkey into the region’s refugee camp and leaves countless thousands stranded in a country with a deteriorating human rights record,” The Washington Post reported at the time.
After a failed military coup attempt on July 15, which plunged the country into brief but violent chaos, Erdogan consolidates power. It oversees a strict crackdown on the independent and critical press. (The Committee to Project Journalists, based in New York, has named Turkey as one of the the main prisoners of journalists.) Erdogan begins a series of purges, expelling thousands, including former allies, from politics, academia, the judiciary and the military, along with expelling foreign NGOs from the country. The purges target many followers of exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan.
2017: Voters approve a slate of constitutional reforms put forward by Erdogan, which change Turkey’s form of government, abolishing the office of prime minister and giving power to an executive president. The following year, Erdogan is re-elected president, in a role that offers considerably more power than in 2014.
After becoming president, Erdogan enacted restrictions on social media platforms and websites such as Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia, and significantly curtailed independent media through arrests and purges, while supporting tightly controlled pro-government media. Regarding Turkey’s steps towards EU membership, European Council President Charles Michel goes on to say that the country’s government often takes “one step in the right direction and then two in the wrong direction”.
2018: After the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, of which Turkish officials obtained audio recordings, Erdogan seems to push for more distant ties between Riyadh and Washington. “Where is Khashoggi’s body? … Who gave the order to kill this kind soul? Unfortunately, the Saudi authorities have refused to answer these questions,” Erdogan writes in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
2019: For the first time since the formation of the party, the AKP candidate loses the mayoral election in Istanbul. The position is held by Ekrem Imamoglu, a member of the opposition Popular Republican Party. Imamoglu, a populist mayor with presidential prospects, is sentenced to prison on charges of “insulting public figures” in 2022, thwarting his chances of running against Erdogan in the 2023 presidential election and casting doubt on his will to ‘Erdogan to allow fair elections.
In October, Turkey launches an offensive against US-allied Kurdish forces in northern Syria. The move puts NATO powers at odds over the fight against the Islamic State.
2021-2022: In the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Erdogan uses Turkey’s status as a NATO member with ties to Russia to position himself as a mediator. In 2022, Turkey and the United Nations facilitate a deal between Russia and Ukraine to restore commercial grain shipments blocked by Russia in the Black Sea, in exchange for easing restrictions on certain Russian exports. He supports Sweden’s bid for NATO membership, saying the country harbors “terrorists” hostile to Turkey’s national security.
