Mehmet Ali Şahin (born 16 September 1950) is a Turkish politician. He was the Speaker of the Parliament of Turkey from 2009 to 2011.^[1]

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Turkish. (November 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Turkish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 493 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Turkish Wikipedia article at [[:tr:Mehmet Ali Şahin]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|tr|Mehmet Ali Şahin}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Quick Facts 24th Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, President ...

Mehmet Ali Şahin
Şahin in 2011
24th Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey
In office 9 August 2009 – 28 June 2011
President	Abdullah Gül
Deputy	Nevzat Pakdil Sadık Yakut Güldal Mumcu Meral Akşener
Preceded by	Köksal Toptan
Succeeded by	Cemil Çiçek
Minister of Justice
In office 29 August 2007 – 1 May 2009
Prime Minister	Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Preceded by	Fahri Kasırga
Succeeded by	Sadullah Ergin
Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey
In office 18 November 2002 – 28 March 2003
Prime Minister	Abdullah Gül
Served with	Ertuğrul Yalçınbayır Abdüllatif Şener
Preceded by	Cumhur Ersümer
Succeeded by	Abdullah Gül
Member of the Grand National Assembly
In office 1 November 2015 – 24 June 2018
Constituency	Karabük (Nov 2015)
In office 8 January 1996 – 7 June 2015
Constituency	İstanbul (1995, 1999, 2002) Antalya (2007) Karabük (2011)
Personal details
Born	(1950-09-16) 16 September 1950 (age 73) Ovacık, Turkey
Political party	Welfare Party (1987-1998) Virtue Party (1998-2001) Justice and Development Party (2001-present)
Alma mater	Istanbul University

Close

He was a member of the parliament for three terms from Istanbul Province and from Antalya Province of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). He served as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, and as Minister of State responsible for sports.^[1]

Şahin is a lawyer and a graduate of Istanbul University faculty of law. Before entering parliament, he was involved in regional politics, serving as the mayor of Fatih district in Istanbul, with the Welfare Party, and later with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party.^[1][2]

On 5 August 2009, he was elected in a third round of voting as the 24th (27th, from the establishment) Speaker of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, succeeding his party colleague Köksal Toptan.^[1] He was supportive of a solution to the Kurdish Turkish conflict, and dismissed the concerns of Turkish nationalists which argue that if Kurds receive more rights it would divide the country.^[3] In 2016, he also suggested the release of the imprisoned members of Parliament from the Peoples' Democracy Party (HDP) comparing their situation to the one of Mehmet Haberal, a lawmaker of the Republican People's Party (CHP) who was elected while imprisoned.^[4]