page_title: Celâl Bayar
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: Celâl Bayar / Political career
caption_attribution_description: English: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, policy making with Celâl Bayar.Türkçe: Cumhurbaşkanı Atatürk ve Başbakan Celâl Bayar'ın trenle yurt gezisine çıkışı, Ankara, 12 Kasım 1937.
context_page_description: Mahmut Celâl Bayar was a Turkish politician, who was the third President of Turkey from 1950 to 1960; previously he was Prime Minister of Turkey from 1937 to 1939. Bayar, as the Turkish President, was decorated with the Legion of Merit by the President of the United States, as a result of Turkey's participation in the Korean War. He is considered to be the longest-lived former head of state and was the longest-lived state leader until 8 December 2008. Celal Bayar died on 22 August 1986 at the age of 103 after a brief illness.
context_section_description: In 1908, Bayar joined the volunteer’s troop of the Committee of Union and Progress, a political organization of Young Turks. He served as the secretary-general of the newly founded Bursa branch and later of the İzmir branch of the party.
  In 1919, Bayar was elected to the Ottoman Parliament in Istanbul as deputy of Saruhan (today Manisa). As he disagreed with the new constitution determined by the Sultan, in 1920 he went to Ankara to join Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish Independence Movement. He became an active member of the "Müdafaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti" (Association for Defence of Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia), another political organization formed after World War I. He became the deputy of Bursa in the newly established Grand National Assembly of Turkey. The same year, he served as Deputy Minister of the Economy and on 27 February 1921 he was appointed as the Minister of the Economy. He led the negotiation commission during Çerkes Ethem's uprising. In 1922, Bayar was a member of the Turkish delegation during the Lausanne Peace Conference as an advisor to İsmet İnönü. After the elections in 1923, he served as the deputy of İzmir in the Parliament. On 6 March 1924 Celâl Bayar was appointed Minister of Exchange Construction and Settlement (until 7 July 1924). On 26 August 1924, Atatürk founded the Türkiye İş Bankası in Ankara by using as capital the gold bullion sent by the Muslims in India to support the Turkish War of Independence. He was the Managing Director of what was the largest Turkish commercial bank until 1932.
  On 1 November 1937 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk appointed Bayar as Prime Minister of the 9th Government of Turkey after İsmet İnönü left the government. He continued to serve as prime minister when Atatürk died and İnönü became president in 1938 (10th government of Turkey). Differences of opinion with Inönü led him to resign from the position on 25 January 1939.
  Until 1945, he was a member of Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (the Republican People's Party), a republican party which most often during the Atatürk era had been the sole legal party. Then on 7 January 1946, he founded Demokrat Parti (the Democratic Party), a socially conservative economically liberal party, along with Adnan Menderes, Fuat Köprülü and Refik Koraltan. The DP won, with 408 of 487 seats, a majority in the first free general elections in Turkish history on 14 May 1950. The parliament elected Bayar as president of Turkey on the 22 May 1950. He was subsequently re-elected in 1954 and 1957, serving for 10 years as president. In that period, Adnan Menderes was his prime minister. It was under his presidency that the anti-Greek Istanbul Pogrom took place on 6–7 September 1955.
caption: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Celal Bayar on 12 November 1937
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