The Erdoğan era

In November 2002, after an economic crash discredited the old parties, the new Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a parliamentary majority. Its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a former Istanbul mayor from a pious working-class family, had come out of the Islamist movement of Necmettin Erbakan but presented the AKP as a conservative democratic party. He became prime minister in 2003.^•

The reform years

The early AKP years brought a boom. Incomes rose fast, healthcare and infrastructure expanded across Anatolia, and reforms to meet EU standards, including on Kurdish language rights, led to the opening of membership talks in 2005. A new, pious middle class from provincial cities, sometimes called the “Anatolian tigers”, rose to wealth and power.^•

The turn

In 2013 protests over plans to build on Gezi Park, beside Istanbul’s Taksim Square, grew into nationwide demonstrations against Erdoğan’s style of rule and were met with tear gas and water cannon. Later that year Erdoğan broke with the Gülenists. He became president in 2014, in the first direct presidential election. After the failed coup of July 2016 came mass purges, and in 2017 a narrowly approved referendum created an executive presidency with sweeping powers.^•

The economy turned sour: the lira lost most of its value against the dollar, and after unorthodox interest-rate cuts inflation reached about 85% in late 2022. Turkey took in more refugees than any other country, mostly from Syria’s war, and resentment of them grew.^•

Still standing

Erdoğan won re-election in May 2023 in a runoff, three months after a devastating earthquake. But in the 2024 local elections the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) won the most votes nationwide. In March 2025 the popular CHP mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, seen as Erdoğan’s strongest rival, was arrested on corruption charges he denies, setting off the largest protests in a decade; his main trial opened in March 2026 with hundreds of co-defendants.^•

What it means

The Erdoğan era reversed the old hierarchy of Turkish life: the secular, Westernised elite that had dominated since Atatürk lost power to the pious majority it had long looked down on. For his supporters that was democracy finally arriving; for his opponents it became the replacement of one exclusive system by another. Most Turks under thirty have known no other leader.^•

Why it matters today