Erdogan Born: Turkey's Dominant and Divisive Leader
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was banned from politics in 1998 for reciting a poem deemed to incite religious hatred. The ban was supposed to end his career. He spent four months in prison, got out, helped found a new party, and won a parliamentary majority within four years. He's been running Turkey ever since. The poem was written by a Turkish nationalist poet and was in the official school curriculum at the time he recited it.
February 26, 1954
72 years ago
What Else Happened on February 26
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