A polarizing figure, on Sunday he will face perhaps the most competitive election of his career. He has presided over soaring inflation, and in recent months his government has come under intense criticism for its response to earthquakes that left more than 50,000 people dead in Turkey earlier this year.
While in office, he has deepened restrictions on speech and expression, and under his government, the judiciary has jailed or brought charges against opponents. Opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, his most prominent challenger, has promised an alternative: “Nothing will never, ever happen to you because you criticize me.”
Here are some of the key points in Erdogan’s career as a public servant and player on the world stage, tracing his path from popular Istanbul mayor to entrenched one-man rule.
1994: Erdogan, already involved in local politics, runs for mayor of Istanbul, winning with approximately 25 percent of the vote as a member of the Welfare Party. As mayor, Erdogan focuses on modernizing public goods and services — including through privatization. Among his constituency: rural-to-urban migrants seeking an alternative to the entrenched secular establishment.
1997: Erdogan is accused of inciting religious hatred after he recites a passage from a poem — which includes militant religious imagery: “the minarets are our bayonets” — that runs afoul of Turkey’s laws enforcing secularism. As a social conservative from an Islamist political tradition, he seeks to gain more political representation for religious Muslims.
1998: Forced to resign as mayor, Erdogan serves a four-month prison sentence in early 1999, over the recitation. His imprisonment only raises his profile.
2001: Erdogan founds the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. He and his allies make the calculation that a straightforward Islamist party would not win power in Turkey in the early 2000s. The AKP positions itself as conservative and respectful of Islamic tradition. “I am a Muslim,” Erdogan told TIME Magazine in 2002. “But I believe in a secularist state.”
2003: Erdogan becomes prime minister after his party wins power in parliament, and some legal changes to allow him to serve despite his imprisonment. In that role, and in the context of Turkey’s pursuit of E.U. membership, Erdogan’s government pursues reforms, including sweeping changes to the penal code, more money allocated to education spending, as well as laws expanding freedom of expression and religion. These come alongside a more conservative agenda, including attempts to restrict the sale of alcohol, which Erdogan also pursued as mayor of Istanbul.
2009: President Barack Obama chooses Turkey as the destination for his first overseas bilateral diplomatic trip. His visit affirms a vision of Turkey charting a path for a form of Islamism acceptable in the West and seemingly bound for E.U. membership. “I came here out of my respect to Turkey’s democracy and culture and my belief that Turkey plays a critically important role in the region and in the world,” Obama says in remarks to a student roundtable during that visit, during which he mentioned having “productive” conversations with Erdogan.
200os: E.U. accession talks, which begin in 2005, stall in the late aughts, with multiple world leaders expressing frustration over the pace of negotiations.
2010s: Regionally, Erdogan receives praise for his leadership of Turkey throughout the Arab Spring, when uprisings rocked the Arab world, according to the Brookings Institution’s 2011 Arab public opinion poll. Among the poll’s 3,000 respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, “Turkey is seen to have played the ‘most constructive’ role in the Arab events,” reads a Brookings write-up of the poll’s results. Among respondents, the write-up says, “those who envision a new president for Egypt want the new president to look most like Erdogan.”
Around that same time, in late 2010, Erdogan and the AKP win a constitutional referendum that curbs the power of the military and changes presidential elections into a national, rather than parliamentary, vote.
2013: Massive anti-government protests, sparked by public opposition to an Erdogan-backed…
Read More: Turkey elections: How Erdogan has reshaped Turkey over decades