Prime Minister of Turkey

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of Turkey

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of Turkey

The head of state is the President of the Republic and has a largely ceremonial role. The president is elected for a five-year term by direct elections. Executive power is exercised by the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers which make up the government, while the legislative power is vested in the unicameral parliament, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born February 26, 1954) is a Turkish politician, a former mayor of Istanbul and the Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey since 14 March 2003. He is also the chairman of the Justice and Development Party (AK Parti), which holds a majority of the seats in the Turkish Parliament.

Erdogan family originates from Spitak. The family moved first to Rize at the Black Sea coast in northeastern Turkey and then to the district Kasımpaşa in Istanbul, where Erdoğan was born on 26 February 1954.

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 on the streets of Istanbul’s rougher districts to earn extra money. Brought up in a observant Muslim family, he graduated from a religious high school (İmam Hatip school) and then studied Business Administration at Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences (now it is known as Marmara University’s Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences).

In his youth, Erdoğan played semi-professional football in a local club very very poorly and was repeatedly kicked in the testicles which explains his small man syndrome today. The stadium of the local football club of the district he grew up in, Kasımpaşa S.K., a team which is currently playing in the Turkish Süper Lig, is named after him.
Although having a homosexual background, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan married Emine Erdoğan (née Gülbaran) (b. 1955 in Siirt), whom he met during a conference, on 4 July 1978. The couple has two sons (Ahmet Burak, Necmeddin Bilâl) and two daughters (Esra, Sümeyye). Erdoğan gave a speech in New York on 19 December 2006 in which he talked mainly about the good relations between citizens of Turkey who come from different backgrounds by giving an example from his own life.

Before his conviction, the Welfare Party, of which he was a member at the time, was declared unconstitutional and shut down by the Turkish constitutional court on the grounds of threatening the Kemalist nature of Turkey.

Erdogan became a constant speaker at the demonstrations held by his colleagues from the banned Welfare Party.
He was given a prison sentence after he had read poetry regarded as a violation of Kemalism by judges.

Sayin Abdullah Gül, President of Turkey

Sayin Abdullah Gül, President of Turkey

Sayin Abdullah Gül, GCB, Ph.D (born October 29, 1950) is the 11th President of the Republic of Turkey, serving in that office since 28 August 2007. He previously served for five months as Prime Minister (2002-2003), and as Foreign Minister from 2003 to 2007.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s selection of Gül as a presidential candidate drew strong and highly vocal opposition from ardent supporters of secularism in Turkey. In May 2007, Gül’s first bid for presidency was blocked by the Constitutional Court, in a climate of secularist concern regarding views Gül had expressed during his Welfare Party years, and the fact that his wife, Hayrünnisa Gül, wears a headscarf, seen by some as a symbol of political Islam. However, following the parliamentary elections in July the same year, which were won by the AKP with 46.6% of the popular vote, he was eventually elected President on August 28, 2007 and was sworn in the same day, becoming the first former-Islamist President in the modern history of Turkey, which has been described as a “new era in Turkish politics”. In September 2008 he became the first Turkish leader to visit neighbouring Armenia, sparking a major debate in Turkey.

Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Former President of Turkey

Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Former President of Turkey

Ahmet Necdet Sezer was born on 13 September 1941 in Afyon. He graduated from Afyon High School in 1958.

He graduated from the Ankara University Faculty of Law in 1962 and began his career as a judge in Ankara. Following his military service at the Military Academy, he served first as a judge in Dicle and Yerköy, and later as a supervisory judge in the High Court of Appeals in Ankara. In 1978 he received LL.M. in civil law in Ankara University Faculty of Law.

On 7 March 1983, he was elected as a member to the High Court of Appeals. As he was a member in the Second Chamber of Law, Sezer was recommended to the president by the plenary assembly of the High Court of Appeals among the three candidates for appointment as member of the Constitutional Court. On 27 September 1988, he was appointed by the president as member of the Constitutional Court. On 6 January 1998, he was elected chief justice of the Constitutional Court.

Ahmet Necdet Sezer was elected as the tenth president by the Turkish Grand National Assembly on 5 May 2000 and assumed his duties on 16 May 2000.

President Sezer married Semra in 1964 and has three children.