Erdogan is unravelling Ataturk’s legacy

If there is a place in Turkey where Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the swaggering six-foot president, looks small it is at the tomb of the nation’s founder. Anitkabir, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s mausoleum, spreads over 185 acres in the heart of the capital Ankara. It is a monument to nationalism, towering modernism and the man who dismantled the Ottoman Empire and then rebuilt it as a nation state. Erdogan has made little secret of his distaste for elements of Ataturk’s project – particularly its staunch secularism – since he first rose to political prominence as mayor of Istanbul in the mid-1990s. Yet since 2003, as prime minister and then president, he has been obliged to visit Anitkabir several times a year on Turkey’s national holidays to publicly pay his respects to his biggest rival.

Observers, though, question for how much longer he will feel the need to demonstrate deference. No matter their feelings about Erdogan, no Turk will deny that he is already the only leader to come close to Ataturk in the extent to which he has changed the country.