In 1994, an aspiring Turkish politician named Recep Tayyip Erdogan leveraged his fame as a player for Istanbul's Kasimpasa Soccer Club into a successful run for mayor of Istanbul as a candidate of the Islamist Welfare Party.
Advertisement
His initial success proved short-lived. In 1998, he was dismissed from his position as mayor, banned from further political office and imprisoned for four months for having recited a poem, during a speech, that promoted an Islamic point of view of the role of government.
Erdogan later abandoned his explicitly Islamist views and recast himself as a socially conservative democrat who espoused liberal economic policies. In 2001, along with a former ally Fethullah Gülen, he founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to reflect his newfound objectives of social conservatism and economic reform.