Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began his national political career as the mayor of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city. Istanbul has large neighborhoods dominated by conservative religious voters, which provided him with an early base of support; Erdoğan’s populist economic policies also served Istanbul’s neglected poor well. However, in 1999, Erdoğan chose Siirt, “a town in the religiously conservative and restive southeastern part of the country,” to give a controversial antisecular speech that landed him in prison for “inciting hatred based on religious difference.”
No mention of them being Muslim 🤔
