Erbakan returns to active politics

Bans, trials, closures and imprisonment… These words can define the long and windy political life of Erbakan. Born in 1926 in the Black Sea city of Sinop, Erbakan was educated to be an engineer, but he preferred to become a politician.

Despite the pressures and bans, he was also successful in becoming the prime minister of Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim but very strictly secular country. He and the parties he had formed were banned as part of efforts to prevent the rise of fundamentalism.

He has led Turkey’s Islamic movement for the past three decades, and has mostly been regarded as a threat to Turkey’s secular order. The parties were closed down, and he was barred from politics several times. His last political ban was imposed in 2000, for "inciting hatred" in a speech he gave in 1994.

The ban on his political life did not, in practice, prevent him from ruling the now-defunct Virtue Party (FP). He was referred to as the "Phantom of the FP", and Recai Kutan was viewed as a caretaker leader, causing two poles within the party: those loyal to Erbakan and the reformists.

These two poles stayed united under the umbrella of the FP until the Constitutional Court’s decision to ban the party, but they had already been at a crossroads for quite some time.

The court’s decision gave these two poles an opportunity to follow two different paths. The reformists formed the Justice and Development Party (AKP), under the leadership of a young Recep Tayyip Erdogan and those loyal to Erbakan united under the umbrella of the Recai Kutan-led SP.