Barış Atay Mengüllüoğlu (born 22 September 1981) is a Turkish actor and a politician of the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP).

Early life and education

He is interested in Theater play since he was ten years old and acted in multiple shows during his early life. He attended primary and secondary school in Antakya and studied Theater at the Yeditepe University in Istanbul, from where he graduated in 2009.

Professional career

He played in several Turkish TV series and movies and together with friends he established the Emek Sahnesi Theater in 2011. He is an outspoken critic of

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (born 26 February 1954) is a Turkish politician serving as the List of presidents of Turkey, 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously served as prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as Lis ...

's policies and the application of the rule of law in Turkey. He acted in the theater play "Only a Dictator" (), which was widely viewed as a parody of Erdoğan. The play was subsequently prohibited to be performed in the Kadiköy district where the Emek Sahnesi Theater is located. As a reaction to this ban, he published the piece in the internet and the play was then shown in the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin.

Political career

He was a strong supporter of the Gezi Park protests and as such was criticized by Melih Gökçek from the governing party, the

Justice and Development Party Justice and Development Party may refer to several political parties, the best-known ones being: * Justice and Development Party (Morocco) * Justice and Development Party (Turkey) Justice and Development Party may also refer to: * Justice and Dev ...

(AKP. In November 2013, he was briefly detained due to suspected links to

RedHack RedHack is a Turkish Marxist-Leninist computer hacker group founded in 1997. The group has claimed responsibility for hacking the websites of institutions which include the Council of Higher Education, Turkish police forces, the Turkish Army ...

, a Turkish hacker group supportive of the Gezi Park protests, but released after a week. In May 2018, he was announced as a candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) for the parliamentary elections in 2018 in which he was elected as a representative of the

Hatay province Hatay Province ( tr, Hatay ili, ) is the southernmost province of Turkey. It is situated almost entirely outside Anatolia, along the eastern coast of the Levantine Sea. The province borders Syria to its south and east, the Turkish province of A ...

. In 2018, he and Erkan Baş announced their resignation from the HDP and together joined the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP), becoming their only representatives in the Parliament.

Controversies

In June 2020, he claimed a car of the TIP he was using was sabotaged by his political opponents in order to cause an accident. After he demanded clarification in a case in which a sergeant was accused of the rape of the Kurdish 18 year old student İpek Er, but released from custody, he drew harsh criticism on him by the Turkish Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu, who blamed him of being a sympathizer of the

Kurdistan Workers' Party The Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK is a Kurdish militant political organization and armed guerrilla movement, which historically operated throughout Kurdistan, but is now primarily based in the mountainous Kurdish-majority regions of south ...

(PKK) and the People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP-C) and advised him "don't get caught". The following night, he claimed that he was attacked by five individuals, causing him to stay the night in the hospital. For the assault, he blamed Soylu.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Atay, Barış Turkish male film actors Turkish male television actors Turkish male stage actors Workers' Party of Turkey (2017) politicians Peoples' Democratic Party (Turkey) politicians 1981 births People from Wilhelmshaven Living people