Erdogan’s milestones before Turkey’s election

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan hopes to extend his rule into a third decade in a May 14 election but faces his toughest test yet at the ballot box, with his popularity hit by a cost-of-living crisis driven by runaway inflation.

Here are some of the milestones in the career of a politician who has brought significant change to Turkey, steering its traditionally secular society towards his Islamist vision, establishing the country as a regional military power and using the courts to crack down on dissent:

March 1994: Erdogan is elected Istanbul mayor as part of the Welfare Party, led by Islamist politician Necmettin Erbakan.

April 1998: Erdogan resigns as mayor after a court sentences him to prison for inciting religious discrimination over a poem he recited in 1997 comparing mosques to barracks, minarets to bayonets and the...