Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan[b] (born 26 February 1954) is a Turkish politician serving as the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001, leading it until 2014, when he was required to stand down upon his election as president. He later returned to the AKP leadership in 2017 following the constitutional referendum that year. Coming from an Islamist political background and self-describing as a conservative democrat, he has promoted socially conservative and populist policies during his administration.
Following the 1994 local elections, Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul as the candidate of the Islamist Welfare Party. He was later stripped of his position, banned from political office, and imprisoned for four months f…