Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been Turkey's prime minister since 2003. Once a football player, he became mayor of Istanbul in 1994. Admired for his reforms and lack of corruption, his term ended with his imprisonment for reciting a poem deemed too Islamic by authorities. This prison sentence barred him from assuming public office, but the law was changed so he could become Prime Minister.  
In 2001, he founded the Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party; his ascension to Prime Minister was controversial for the secular nation.  As prime minister, he has enacted many liberal reforms, including allowing the use of the Kurdish language in some instances.  He has also pursued full inclusion into the European Union while not forsaking Turkey's key role as a stable democracy in the Middle East.  During the Arab Spring, he criticized Assad's harsh treatment of the Syrian people and allowed refugees to settle in Turkey.


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