Erdogan in brief. From football to political stadiums

Erdogan was looking forward to professional football before moving into politics. Archival

Born in Istanbul's popular Kassimpaşa district, Turkey's re-term winner Recep Tayyip Erdogan aspired to a short career in football before moving into politics.

Erdogan learned the origins of the political game within the Islamist movement led by Necmettin Erbakan, then came to the fore with his election as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, and in 1998 he was sentenced to prison with enforcement after singing a religious poem, which led to the sympathy of many within Turkish society.

After the AKP, which he co-founded, won the 2002 elections, Erdogan became prime minister the following year, a position he held until 2014, when he became Turkey's first president elected by direct universal suffrage.

Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952 and has the second-largest military (numerically) among the alliance countries after the United States, with which it disagrees on a number of points, including Washington's support for the Syrian Kurds and Ankara's acquisition of a Russian missile defense system.

Political life in Turkey witnessed three military coups (1960, 1971 and 1980), and on July 15, 2016, Erdogan succeeded in thwarting a coup attempt that killed 250 people and injured 1500,<> others.

In Erdogan's first decade in power, Turkey joined the Group of 20 richest countries, modernized the country by building airports, roads, bridges, hospitals and hundreds of thousands of homes, and in 2017 the Sunni-majority Turkey, with a population of 85 million, moved from a parliamentary system to a presidential system.

Erdogan, who is married and father of four, remains in the eyes of his supporters the only one capable of standing up to the West and leading the ship to survive regional, international and economic crises, which strengthened his position in the presidential elections that he won yesterday in the run-off against his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu.