"Erdoğan was a semi-professional footballer playing for Kasımpaşa Spor Kulübü before being elected as the Mayor of Istanbul from the Islamist Welfare Party in 1994.
He was stripped and banned from office after being sentenced to 10 months in prison for inciting religious intolerance in 1998, after which he abandoned openly Islamist politics and established the moderate conservative AKP in 2001.The AKP won a landslide victory in the 2002 general election, with the party's co-founder Abdullah Gül becoming Prime Minister until his government annulled Erdoğan's ban from political office. Erdoğan subsequently became Prime Minister in March 2003 after winning a seat in a by-election held in Siirt.[6]"
...A US$100 billion government corruption scandal in 2013 led to the arrests of Erdoğan's close allies, with Erdoğan himself incriminated after a recording was released on social media.[15][16][17]
Erdoğan's government has since come under fire for electoral fraud, demeaning the Constitution, alleged human rights violations and crackdown on press and social media, having blocked access to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube on numerous occasions.[18][19][20][21]
Opposition journalists and politicians have thus branded him a "dictator".[22][23][24][25][26]
No comments:
Post a Comment