Do we like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A long run of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policy and a scrapped women's treaty, with a real peace push and a climate summit on the other side.
Erdoğan is the man who has run Türkiye from the president's chair for a dozen years. He is currently fronting an effort to end a conflict with Kurdish militants that has killed more than 40,000 people. I couldn't open a full profile for this card, so the potted history is skipped and we're judging the record in the sources below.
The story that keeps coming up is Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor who was detained in March 2025, the day his party named him its presidential candidate. He went on trial in March 2026 alongside more than 400 co-defendants, and prosecutors are seeking 2,430 years. Amnesty International condemned the trial as the “disturbing weaponization of Turkey's justice system”. No statement from Erdoğan or the government was in those reports, and prosecutors say İmamoğlu ran a criminal network.
On LGBTQ+ people it's plain. Launching 2025 as the 'Year of the Family', Erdoğan said children and youth must be protected from “perverse ideologies”, and he said LGBT is used as a battering ram against the family. Pride marches in Istanbul stayed banned, and dozens were detained in June 2025 after the governor said the march undermined “family structure and moral values”. Turkey scored 5 out of 100 on ILGA-Europe's 2024 rainbow map.
On women, he told a 2014 summit that men and women can't be put in equal positions, and said what women need is to be “equivalent, rather than equal”. In 2021 he pulled Türkiye out of the Istanbul Convention, a treaty against gender-based violence, by overnight decree. The Council of State upheld his right to do it in July 2022. His supporters had argued the treaty promoted LGBTQ rights, while women's groups called the ruling terrifying.
Then there's what happens to people who criticise him. One report counted 38,581 'insulting the president' cases filed in his name between 2014 and 2020, with convictions in thousands of cases each year. Amnesty said in May 2026 that 14 journalists and media workers were in prison, with many more facing what it called groundless prosecutions.
To be fair, there's real good here. In February 2026 a parliamentary commission backed, by 47 votes of 50, a roadmap to pair legal reforms with verified PKK disarmament, and Erdoğan called it the start of the next phase in parliament. At the UN in September he also pushed COP31 in Antalya as an 'implementation COP' and flagged new 2035 targets. The DEM Party broadly welcomed the report but objected to it framing the Kurdish issue as terrorism.