ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Suleyman Demirel was a master pragmatist whose remarkable talent for staying on top of Turkish politics saw him survive two coups, serve seven terms as Turkey’s prime minister and cap his career with the presidency.
Unusually in Turkey’s polarized political space, Demirel — who died early Wednesday at the age of 90 — sought the common ground, easily abandoned grudges and occasionally stepped aside when under pressure.
“He was very pragmatic, particularly in a society where people often engage in politics through their ideologies,” said Ilter Turan, an emeritus professor of political science at Istanbul Bilgi University. He described Demirel as a consensus-builder who eschewed revenge.
“He was a man of ambition, but he was not ruthless.”
Demirel died at 2:05 a.m. at Ankara’s Guven Hospital of heart failure and a respiratory tract infection, doctors said in an announcement broadcast on Turkish television.
He served as head of state from 1993 to 2000, the culmination of a four-decade career that repeatedly took him in and out of high office — with two stints as prime minister cut short by military intervention.
Born to a peasant family in a village in southwestern Turkey, he moved from the civil service to the private sector and then into politics, where he distinguished himself by his hard work and an open embrace of political realism.
Demirel was hardly alone in tailoring his politics to suit the circ*mstances of the day, but his unabashed acknowledgement of policy reversals was unusual.
“Yesterday is yesterday. Today is today,” ran one his favorite slogans. Demirel made no apologies for chasing after power either. “What good is a man without ambition?” he said.
He believed his governments of the 1960s and 1970s deserved much of the credit for transforming Turkey from a largely agrarian society into an increasingly industrial and urban one, bringing higher living standards for most Turks.
But critics say Demirel symbolized a culture in which power came before principles, and helped entrench patronage and graft. They point to a notorious “family photograph” in which he was surrounded by relatives and associates from the business world — some of whom were later jailed for corruption.
In one of his last public appearances in October, Demirel said he believed he had paid his debt to the state.
“Whether it was paid back to the full — that is for the people to decide,” he said.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Demirel “will be remembered by our beloved people in times to come for the task he took on, the services he brought about and his political role.” The Turkish government announced three days of mourning in Demirel’s honor.
Demirel was born on Nov 1, 1924 in the village of Islamkoy and was shaped in large part by his rural background. Early efforts to learn the Quran by heart were credited for his prodigious memory. A lack of electricity and watching his fellow villagers pray for rain sparked his interest in hydroelectric power.
Demirel trained as an engineer and headed a dam-building program, earning the nickname “King of dams,” before working for American civil engineering company Morrison-Knudsen.
He launched his political career after the 1960 military coup that deposed the government of Adnan Menderes. Menderes and two Cabinet colleagues were executed, and many leading figures in their party were banned from politics — leaving a vacuum on the center-right.
Into that gap strode the political unknown Demirel.
At the age of 40 — youthful by Turkish political standards, then and now — Demirel was a surprise choice as leader of the newly formed Justice Party, a center-right successor to Menderes’ party. He came to power with a landslide win in 1965.
His populist style — Demirel was known as “Sulu the shepherd” because of his village background — and his canny use of the symbols of Islam proved a vote-winner in the conservative countryside where most Turks lived.
In the 1960s, his government balanced the demands of its rural support base with the need to push Turkey into the industrial era, producing annual growth of around 6 percent a year and pushing electricity and roads into new corners of Turkey.
But by 1970, Demirel was on the defensive amid rising political radicalism. On the left, students and workers groups demanded radical reform, while Demirel was being outflanked on the right by new nationalist and pro-Islamic parties.
When the ideological conflict started to turn violent, Turkey’s generals issued an ultimatum that forced Demirel out of office in 1971 — the so-called “coup by memorandum.”
Successive governments, led first by military-backed technocrats and then by Demirel’s great rival Bulent Ecevit, failed to get a grip on the spiraling violence, which worsened in the 1970s as Turkey’s economy, hit by sharply rising oil prices, slumped into crisis.
Demirel was back in power in 1975, but his unwieldy coalition — including Islamists and nationalists — couldn’t halt Turkey’s slide into chaos. Many accused Demirel of turning a blind eye to his nationalist coalition partners who openly incited violence that saw dozens killed weekly in clashes between left- and right-wing gangs.
He was deposed in a second military coup in 1980 and banned from politics for much of the decade, but returned as prime minister in 1991. He became president in 1993 on the death of Turgut Ozal.
As president, Demirel fostered ties with the Turkic republics of the former Soviet Union, and took credit for brokering the peaceful ouster of an Islamist government under pressure from the secular-minded military in 1997, at a time when many feared a coup. The ouster was later dubbed Turkey’s “postmodern coup.”
Demirel’s wife, Nazmiye, died in May 2013. The couple had no children.
He was expected to be buried in Islamkoy after a state funeral, tentatively set for Friday, in Ankara.
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Raphael Satter in Istanbul contributed to this report.
