Will Erdogan be Turkey’s next Ataturk?

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan initiated his campaign for the August presidential elections in Samsun, a city on the Black Sea coast. After speaking at a crowded rally joined by tens of thousands of supporters, he headed to his next stop: the northeastern city of Erzurum. Notably, for anyone with a basic knowledge of Turkish political history, the selection of these two cities was not random. For these were the very first two stops of Gen. Mustafa Kemal, later named Ataturk (Father of the Turks), when he moved from Istanbul to Anatolia in 1919 to initiate Turkey’s War of Independence (1919-22) against occupying armies.

No wonder Erdogan underlined the historical parallelism. In Samsun, he said, “We are taking the first big step in Samsun, the city of big beginnings. Gazi Mustafa Kemal took the first step of the War of Independence here.”

Recently, there have been other references by Erdogan and his team to Turkey’s founding father. In the wake of the local elections on March 30, for example, he declared himself to be the leader of Turkey’s “second war of independence,” a clear reference to the original war that Ataturk led. When his aides began promoting the system of an all-powerful presidency in 2012, which Erdogan hopes to realize at some point, they also referred to Ataturk as an example.

This is very interesting, because until very recently Ataturk and his political legacy was a theme that religious conservatives almost always criticized. So, should we understand this newly discovered interest in Kemalism as a sudden change in conservative ideology and identity? Probably not, because the pro-Erdogan conservatives are still very critical of the ideological components of Kemalism such as authoritarian secularism and ethnic Turkish nationalism. Yet, they now seem to partly admire, and imitate, the methods Ataturk used to accumulate and consolidate power.