Abdullah Gül

Abdullah Gül (born October 29, 1950, Kayseri, Turkey) is a Turkish politician who served as prime minister (2002–03) and president of Turkey (2007–14).

Gül inherited his politics from his father, who owned a modest metalworking shop and who had stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate of the National Salvation Party (NSP; Millî Selâmet Partisi), the first Islamist party to make an impact. After Gül graduated (1971) with a degree in economics from Istanbul University, where he was active in the nationalist Turkish National Students’ Union, he spent two years conducting postgraduate studies in Exeter, England. He then returned to Turkey and was briefly detained after the 1980 military coup. In 1983 he earned a Ph.D. from Istanbul University and subsequently became an economist at the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

In 1991 Gül launched himself full-time into Turkish politics, becoming the international spokesman for the Welfare Party (WP; Refah Partisi), a reincarnation of the NSP, which had been outlawed by the constitutional court because of a ban in Turkey on religiously based political parties. He later became minister in the coalition government headed by WP leader Necmettin Erbakan. When Erbakan was eased out of office by the military in 1997 and the WP was closed down, Gül became a leading member of a group of modernizers who broke away from Erbakan and formed the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) as a democratic, conservative, but nonconfessional movement. In the 2002 parliamentary elections, the AKP won an absolute majority. However, the party’s leader, former Istanbul mayor Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had been legally barred from holding public office, because of a 1998 conviction for inciting religious hatred. Thus, Gül, who was deputy leader of the AKP, served as prime minister for four months until Erdoğan was allowed back into politics.

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In 2003 Gül became foreign minister in Erdoğan’s government. During his four-year tenure at the Foreign Ministry, Gül concentrated on pushing forward Turkey’s application for membership in the European Union, and he acquired a reputation as a skillful and nonconfrontational negotiator who was as popular with his staff as he was with his foreign constituents. A pious practicing Muslim himself, Gül seemed ideally placed to represent the mass of conservative Turks who practiced Islam while maintaining loyalty to the secular republic and remaining open to the outside world in their outlook.

In April 2007 the AKP nominated Gül to succeed Pres. Ahmet Necdet Sezer. His candidacy, however, was blocked by secular parties and the military. Later that year the AKP won an overwhelming victory in the general elections. Gül was again put forth as president, and on August 28, 2007, he was elected by parliament. Gül insisted that he would work for all the country’s citizens irrespective of creed or ethnic origin. In September 2008 he became the first Turkish president to visit Armenia, and the following year the two countries agreed to work toward normalizing relations.

In 2014, with his seven-year term as president coming to an end, Gül announced that he would not stand for a second term. He instead returned to the AKP, having previously severed his formal ties to the party as a requirement of serving as president. Political developments in the latter half of the decade, however, led Gül to back the formation of a new party, the Democracy and Progress Party (Democrasi ve Atılım Partisi; DEVA), in 2020.