Meral Akşener

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Meral Akşener (2016)

Meral Akşener (born July 18, 1956 in İzmit ) is a nationalist Turkish politician . From November 1996 to June 1997 she was Turkey’s Interior Minister as the first and so far only woman in this office. After she was expelled from the Party of the Nationalist Movement (MHP) in 2016 in the course of a political dispute , she founded the İyi Parti (“Good Party”) in 2017 .

Origin and education

Meral Akşener was born as the daughter of Tahir Ömer and Sıddıka in the Gündoğdu district of Izmit. Her parents' roots are in Thessaloniki . She studied history at the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences at Istanbul University . She then obtained her PhD from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Marmara University . After completing her studies, she worked as a university lecturer at Yıldız University of Technology , Kocaeli University and Marmara University .

Political career

In 1994 Akşener switched to politics, became chairwoman of the DYP women's association and, in the 1995 parliamentary election, was a member of the Right Way Party (DYP) for Istanbul . On November 8, 1996, she became interior minister in the Erbakan cabinet when she succeeded Mehmet Ağar . The post was vacated due to Agar's involvement in the Susurluk scandal . With the intervention of the military in 1997 and the subsequent resignation of Erbakan , Akşener's time as interior minister came to an end. In 1999 she was re-elected for the DYP as a member of the Grand National Assembly, this time for Kocaeli . In 2001 she left the DYP and initially joined a group of former Refah politicians. Before they founded the AKP, however, they left the circle again.

In 2007 she returned to parliament, now as a member of the MHP . In addition, she became (alongside Güldal Mumcu ) Deputy Speaker of Parliament. She was re-elected in the general election in June 2015 . In the early election in November of the same year she was removed from this post by MHP chairman Devlet Bahçeli . In 2016, she tried to challenge Bahçeli in the fight for party leadership. In September 2016, she was expelled from the party without there having been a party conference at which she could run.

Akşener at the first party congress of the İYİ Parti

Akşener announced in 2017 that it would run its own party in the next presidential and parliamentary elections . On October 25, 2017, she held the first meeting of her new party called İyi Parti. The founding members include opposition MHP politicians as well as politicians from the Welfare Party (RP), the Motherland Party (ANAP), the Democratic Left Party (DSP) and their former Right Way Party. The party is supposed to represent an alternative for dissatisfied voters of the ruling AKP and the opposition MHP.

Akşener is married and has one child.

Web links

literature

  • Michael Martens: Chauvinist ahead, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Woche 44/2017, p. 32.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b TBMM : Profile of Meral Akşener , accessed on December 14, 2009 (Turkish)
  2. ^ Presidential election in Turkey: a tough opponent. Retrieved May 19, 2018 .
  3. ^ Presidential election in Turkey: a tough opponent. Retrieved May 19, 2018 .
  4. ↑ IYI PARTI: Meral Akşener are party establishment known . In: German Turkish Journal | DTJ ONLINE . October 25, 2017 ( dtj-online.de [accessed October 25, 2017]).
personal data
SURNAME Akşener, Meral
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Turkish politician
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH İzmit