Over the past two decades, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has emerged as the undisputed master of Turkish politics. Elected prime minister in 2003, then president in 2014, he is gearing up for a hotly contested re-election bid later in 2023. FRANCE 24's Shona Bhattacharyya and Ludovic de Foucaud look back at the political legacy of a man who has had a profound impact on the lives of everyday Turks, for better or for worse.
Born in Istanbul to a family from the Black Sea, and with dreams of becoming a professional football player in his youth, Erdogan proved highly appealing to those who are sometimes called "Black Turks": conservative, often religious, and poorly educated voters, who had long felt abandoned by previous secular and Western-leaning governments. Over the last 20 years, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) put them in the driving seat of the country.
His early years marked one of the most open periods of modern Turkish history: opening up the economy to attract foreign capital; holding direct negotiations with the Kurdish PKK (since 1984, a civil war had killed tens of thousands); and allowing veiled women access to university, the army and civil service.
The former Islamist militant allowed yearly Gay Pride parades until 2014, when close to a million revellers filled the streets of Istanbul. His country was the first to ratify the Council of Europe's Convention on preventing and combatting violence against women (informally known as the Istanbul Convention).
Embracing authoritarianism
But in May 2013, protests against a plan to build a shopping centre in Gezi Park in Istanbul marked a turning point, with police violence. Soon afterwards, the emergence of Kurdish groups close to the PKK in the Syrian conflict contributed to the breakdown of negotiations with the terror group in Turkey. In 2015, the government launched a bombing campaign in the southeast of the country.
In July 2016, following a failed coup d'Etat, Erdogan declared a state of emergency. In the months that followed, tens of thousands of people were arrested, and the army was purged. Officially, they were accused of supporting Fethullah Gülen, a preacher and former ally of the head of state. In reality, all those who denounced the government's policies – in particular regarding human rights – were targeted. In July 2021, Erdogan pulled Turkey out of the Istanbul Convention.
>> Read our webdocumentary on Turkey's 'great purge'
A divisive figure
For the president’s electoral base, these events are regarded as distant echoes that have no bearing on their day-to-day lives. Mehmet Ali, owner of a kebab eatery, is one of them. "Before Erdogan, when I opened my first business, you had to tip the civil servants, but I didn't know. My restaurant was slow in getting the necessary permits before the opening. It was a colleague of mine who told me I had to slip in bank notes between the pages of a notebook. But once the AKP came to power, when I tried to hand over a notebook again, the firefighter who had come to inspect the ventilation refused, and my cheeks were red with shame." Like him, Turkish business owners have often seen their fortunes improve these past 20 years, and remain faithful to the president.
To film this report, we wanted access to a family where the parents support Erdogan, but the children do not. After several months of searching, Mehmet Ali opened his doors to us "to explain to the world (his) love for (his) president". His children are not as convinced, but avoid direct confrontation with their father on camera. In the election that is slated to take place this year, 6 million new voters will be casting their ballots for the first time. They were all born after Erdogan came to power.
A crunch presidential election
Although some voters benefited from the Erdogan years, others, like Erdem, lost out. The former journalist was sent to jail for publishing "state secrets" in a 2015 article. Today he is an opposition mayor of a district of Istanbul. His party, the CHP, the secular outfit founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, won the municipal elections in all the country's biggest cities in 2019. By forming a coalition with five other opposition parties, it hopes to put an end to the Erdogan era in the elections scheduled for June 2023.
