Erdogan's claim on Ataturk legacy is bizarre political reach
Despite his policies in polar opposition to those of founder of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has touted him as a brother whose memory is only served by his own ruling party.
“He was Dictator in order that it may be impossible ever again there should be in Turkey a Dictator,” concluded the benign interpretation of H.C. Armstrong, who was among Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s first biographers, in his short and controversial account of the founder of modern Turkey, “Grey Wolf.”
Even a casual observer of contemporary Turkey would glean that if this truly was Ataturk’s goal, he has failed. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is regarded as one of the most dictatorial leaders to guide the country since the great man himself. What's more, after a career spent in an Islamist movement erected in opposition to Ataturk’s steamrolling push to secularize Turkey and turn its back on its former Muslim dominions, Erdogan, a professionally trained Muslim cleric, has set about making Ataturk all his.
This astonishing volte face was detected early on by Al-Monitor columnist Mustafa Akyol, who explored some of the parallels between the autocrats despite their polar-opposite worldviews.
But nothing prepared Erdogan’s pious base for his latest and very public embrace of Ataturk on Nov. 10, the 79th anniversary of his death. Erdogan breezily claimed that the ties between the late leader and the pro-secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which Ataturk founded, had ended on the day that he died. Coup plotters and assorted others “hostile to the history of our homeland and the values of our people” had only invoked his name.
