Profile: Racep Tayyip Erdoğan
Erdoğan was born in 1954 at the Kasımpaşa neighbourhood of Istanbul to which his family had moved from Rize Province.
Erdoğan spent his early childhood in Rize, where his father was a member of the Turkish Coast Guard. The family returned to Istanbul when Erdoğan was 13 years old. As a teenager, he sold lemonade and sesame buns (simit) on the streets of the city’s rougher districts to earn extra money.
He brought up in an observant Muslim family, Erdoğan graduated from Kasımpaşa Piyale primary school in 1965, and İmam Hatip school, in 1973. He received his high school diploma from Eyüp High School.
He subsequently studied Business Administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences (now known as Marmara University‘s Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences).
Erdoğan married Emine Gülbaran on 4 July 1978 and they have two sons; Ahmet Burak and Necmeddin Bilal, and two daughters, Esra and Sümeyye.
After the 1980 military coup, Erdoğan followed most of Necmettin Erbakan‘s followers into Welfare Party. He became the party’s Beyoğlu district chair in 1984, and in 1985 he became the chair of the Istanbul city branch. He was elected to parliament in 1991, but barred from taking his seat.
On 27th March 1994, Erdoğan was elected Mayor of Istanbul.
In his term he was pragmatic in office, tackling chronic problems in Istanbul including water shortage, pollution and traffic chaos.
In December 1997, Erdoğan recited a poem in Siirt from a work written by Ziya Gökalp, a pan-Turkish activist of the early 20th century and he was given a ten-month prison sentence of which he served four months, from 24 March 1999 to 27 July 1999. Due to his conviction, Erdoğan was forced to give up his mayoral position.
He founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2001, leading it to general election victory in 2002.
Erdoğan became Prime Minister in March 2003 after Gül’s government annulled his political ban.
Erdogan was named as the AKP candidate for the 2014 presidential election on 1 July, which he won with 51.79% of the vote. He was sworn in as the 12th President of Turkey on 28 August, with speculation that he would continue to pursue his political agenda while his new Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, would take a docile approach.