Ahmet Necdet Sezer

Ahmet Necdet Sezer was born on 13 September 1941 and built a legal career that led him to the presidency of Turkey's Constitutional Court in January 1998. Two years later, after Süleyman Demirel's term expired, the Grand National Assembly elected Sezer as president in 2000 with broad parliamentary support. He took office as an ardent secularist, convinced that Turkey's secular foundations were under threat, and the conviction shaped everything that followed. A 2001 quarrel with Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit triggered a financial meltdown, blamed on coalition weakness and heavy IMF debt. When the conservative Islamist Justice and Development Party won a landslide in 2002, Sezer became its chief institutional obstacle: he vetoed laws on banking reform and the lifting of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's political ban, referred others to the Constitutional Court, and refused to allow women in headscarves - including the wives of Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül - into presidential receptions. Erdoğan later said publicly that he had "suffered a lot" from Sezer, who left office in 2007 when Gül succeeded him.