Erdogan, Recep Tayyip

Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip (rĕjĕp` tīyĭp` âr`dōän), 1954–, Turkish politician. He was educated at Marmara Univ., where he met Necmettin Erbakan, who went on to head the Islamist Welfare party and serve (1996–7) as prime minister. Active in the Welfare party by the mid-1980s, Erdoğan was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994. In 1998 he was convicted of inciting religious for reading a poem with martial Islamic images, he served four months in prison. In 2001, Erdoğan and others found the Justice and Development party as the successor to the banned (1998) Welfare party. In the 2002 elections the new party won an overwhelming majority in parliament, but Erdoğan was banned from running because of his 1998 conviction. After the constitution was amended, Erdoğan was elected (2003) and became prime minister. He has moved from the strongly Islamist positions he once espoused to more mainstream conservative positions, and his government has pursued reforms required for Turkey to enter the European Union.