June 19, 2013
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Description
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the 25th and current Prime Minister of Turkey, in office since 2003. He is also the chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party, which holds a majority of the seats in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Erdoğan served as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998.
He finished Imam Hatip school before studying in Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Commercial Sciences, where he graduated in 1981. Erdoğan was also a semi-professional footballer from 1969 to 1982.
Erdoğan was elected Mayor of Istanbul in the local elections of 27 March 1994. He was banned from office and sentenced to a ten-month prison term for reciting a poem during a public address in the province of Siirt in 1997. The poem was allegedly quoted from a book published by a state enterprise and one that had been recommended to teachers by the Ministry of Education. After less than four months in prison, Erdoğan established the Justice and Development Party in 2001. From its first year, the AK Party became the largest publicly supported political movement in Turkey. In the general election of 2002 the AK Party won nearly two-thirds of the seats in parliament, forming the first single-party government.
(via Freebase)
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