Live updates: Turkey awaits crucial election results
In December 2002 at the White House, President George W. Bush greeted an up-and-coming politician from Turkey whose newly formed party had just won a surprise majority in parliament.
“Welcome to the home of one of your country’s best friends and allies,” Bush told politician Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “You are a strategic ally and friend of the United States.”
Two months later, Mr. Erdogan prime minister, rocketing him to the top of the Turkish political system and beginning his two-decade tenure as his country’s most powerful figure.
Sunday’s Turkish elections are in many ways a referendum on the dramatic changes Erdogan has made in 11 years as prime minister and nine years as president. Once a new political force that promised to clean up corruption, expand the economy and strengthen ties with the West, he is now a near-omnipotent leader, accused of Turkey’s declining currency and criticized for undermining democracy .
Mr. Erdogan, 69, grew up in a poor neighborhood in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, where his father was a ferry captain. He studied in Islamic schools usually intended for future clerics, but entered politics, winning a four-year term as mayor of Istanbul in 1994. Residents credited him with cleaning up the old, cluttered metropolis.
In 1997, he was removed from office and sentenced to 10 months in prison for inciting violence after reciting an Islamist poem at a rally. He ended up serving only four months, but was given a longer ban from politics.
When his Justice and Development Party, which he helped found, won an unexpected parliamentary majority in 2002, it was the strongest showing yet by an Islamist political group in Turkey’s staunchly secular political system. The following year, Erdogan’s political ban ended and he became prime minister.
For about a decade, he and his party kept their promises of good governance and economic growth. Turkey’s gross domestic product has more than tripled, lifting millions of people out of poverty and building new airports, hospitals, highways and bridges across the country.
Internationally, Mr. Erdogan hailed as an Islamist and pro-business democrat who could serve as a bridge between the West and the Muslim world.
But challenges came. In 2013, protests against a construction project Mr Erdogan had supported on the site of a park in Istanbul escalated into massive anti-government demonstrations. Fearing instability, some foreign investors began to withdraw their capital.
In 2016, two years after becoming president, Mr. Erdogan survived an attempted coup that included a failed attempt to kidnap him from a beach town. He responded by further centralizing power and sidelining critics. clean up tens of thousands of the judiciary and state bureaucracy and replaced many of them with loyalists, limiting civil liberties and increasing his influence over the news media.
In 2017, he insisted a constitutional referendum that ended Turkey’s parliamentary system and transferred much of the power of the state to the president, i.e. to him.
All the while, he and his party remained formidable at the polls, using their electoral mandate to promote a religiously conservative outlook. Mr Erdogan expanded Islamic education and relaxed regulations aimed at ensuring a secular state, including lifting a ban on headscarves for women in government positions.
Many of his constituents, who were mostly rural, pious and working-class, saw him as their defender of a secular elite they felt looked down upon.
But Mr. Erdogan’s honeymoon with the West, especially the United States, did not last long. He accused Washington of complicity in the coup attempt because the cleric he accused of masterminding the plot lives in Pennsylvaniaan accusation the cleric denies.
After Mr. Bush, Presidents Obama and Trump both welcomed Mr. Erdogan to the White House, but President Biden did not. And on Saturday, the last day of the campaign, Mr Erdogan accused Mr Biden of working with Turkey’s political opposition to oust him.