page_title: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
section_title: Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan / Presidency (2014–present) / Foreign policy / Europe
caption_attribution_description: Türkçe: Recep Tayyip Edoğan'ın Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanı sıfatıyla yurtdışına gerçekleştirdiği ziyaretler.English: Foreign trips made by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as President of Republic of Turkey.
context_page_description: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a Turkish politician serving as the 12th and current President of Turkey. He previously served as Prime Minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as Mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001, leading it to election victories in 2002, 2007, and 2011 before standing down upon his election as President in 2014. He later returned to the AKP leadership in 2017 following the constitutional referendum that year. Coming from an Islamist political background and as a self-described conservative democrat, he has promoted socially conservative and populist policies during his administration.
  Erdoğan played football for Kasımpaşa before being elected as the Mayor of Istanbul in 1994, as the candidate of the Islamist Welfare Party. He was later stripped of his position, banned from political office, and imprisoned for four months for inciting religious hatred, due to his recitation of a poem by Ziya Gökalp. Erdoğan subsequently abandoned openly Islamist politics, establishing the moderate conservative AKP in 2001, which he went on to lead to a landslide victory in 2002.
context_section_description: In February 2016 Erdoğan threatened to send the millions of refugees in Turkey to EU member states, saying: "We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses ... So how will you deal with refugees if you don't get a deal?"
  In an interview to the news magazine Der Spiegel, the German minister of defence Ursula von der Leyen said on Friday, 11 March 2016, that the refugee crisis had made good cooperation between EU and Turkey an "existentially important" issue. "Therefore it is right to advance now negotiations on Turkey's EU accession".
  In its resolution "The functioning of democratic institutions in Turkey" from 22 June 2016, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe warned that "recent developments in Turkey pertaining to freedom of the media and of expression, erosion of the rule of law and the human rights violations in relation to anti-terrorism security operations in south-east Turkey have ... raised serious questions about the  functioning of its democratic institutions".
  On 20 August 2016 Erdoğan told his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko that Turkey would not recognize the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea; calling it "Crimea's occupation".
  In January 2017, Erdoğan said that the withdrawal of Turkish troops from Northern Cyprus is "out of the question" and Turkey will be in Cyprus "forever".
caption: Foreign trips made by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as President (since 2014)
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