Understanding Atatürk’s Legacy Under Erdoğan

It was dusk by the time I pulled out of Hasankale station and continued my journey eastward, chasing the evening sun over the Anatolian plains. The family I had shared a cabin and spinach börek with for the past twenty-four hours had just disembarked, leaving their seats all but empty; a scribbled goodbye note and trail of filo pastry remained in their place. They had waved goodbye from the station platform, dwarfed by a banner displaying a face I was now familiar with. The same face displayed on the mother’s phone lock screen, and the same face I would encounter it seemed in every city and municipality of Türkiye. That of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.  

This wasn’t my first sighting of Atatürk. I had seen him on street murals, billboards, laminated restaurant menus. But seeing his face on material better preserved than the tracks I rode away on, in a remote Anatolian village, demonstrated to me the reverence he commanded. Even in the most sparse and impressive landscapes, he could be seen. 

That was in July 2025. 11 years into Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidency and four months after Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested. As Erdoğan’s conservative Islamist campaign was intensifying, Atatürk’s image as the secular and modernising father of Türkiye remained paradoxically intact. To the untrained eye, it would seem that two titans of Turkish politics, with diametrically opposed ideologies, could coexist. However, the current climate is far more complex. Erdoğan is increasingly eroding Atatürk’s Türkiye, rendering him a mere relic to be marvelled at from train windows. Ironically, a man who wished to do away with religion is now commemorated through deistic iconography. 

Atatürk is regarded as the father of modern day Türkiye. The man who declared an independent Anatolia to be the land of the Turks, Türkiye, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. His leadership is synonymous with the modernisation of education, embracing of European custom and establishment of a secular republic. His ideology, Kemalism, was the antithesis of his predecessors, advocating reformism, republicanism and populism. Conceived to separate the Republic from the Ottoman Caliphate, Kemalism looked towards the West. Despite initiating a dynamic and revolutionary period in Turkish history, Atatürk’s legacy has remained static ever since. He remains a source of reverence, immortalised in street names and street art. A God in all but name. And beliefs. 

Erdoğan grew up in the shadow of this untouchable legacy, aware of it being something he opposed yet ought to respect. Whilst his politics lie on the opposite end of the spectrum to Kemalism, this hasn’t manifested in an explicit rejection of Atatürk. Erdoğan toes the ceremonial line, espousing ‘eternal respect’ for the country’s father alongside fellow Turks. However, he respects a hollow version of Atatürk, honouring his name whilst opposing ‘Kemalism and the aggressive secularism’ he ushered in. He is more concerned with who claims a monopoly over his legacy, than what this legacy politically entails. And so, as leader, he has sought to co-opt and redact history, separating the man from the contemporary political movements he inspires. 

In order to reconcile his politics with Atatürk’s, Erdoğan has denied the existence of any tension and claimed his opponent’s hero as his own. This, then, is how Erdoğan has successfully escalated his neo-Ottoman, conservative and authoritarian agenda all whilst maintaining a veneer of respect for the father of the Turks. As the Prime Minister, President, and leader of the AKP, he has eroded democratic rule, human rights, and international credibility. From imprisoning dissenting journalists to claiming childless women to be ‘deficient,’ Erdoğan has led with authoritative conservatism reminiscent of former Ottoman sultans. Whilst he has made progress in brokering peace with the PKK, a militant Kurdish movement located in Türkiye’s heartlands, he has sown division in the nation’s cosmopolitan cities by imposing a traditional islamist agenda. Coups and political challenges have been met with extreme purges in the public and legal sphere; 4,156 judges and prosecutors were removed from their posts in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt whilst Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was charged with 142 offences in 2025 for posing a political threat to Erdoğan. He rules with an iron fist yet wears the mask of Atatürk’s descendent. Indeed, he insists that others who show hostility towards his leadership ‘under the mask of Ataturk,’ are misguided in their understanding of his legacy. He insists that his interpretation of Ataturk is the appropriate one, and certainly not something that contradicts his modus operandi. And so, as Erdoğan destroys Atatürk’s Turkey in the same breath that he honours his name, he distorts his very identity. His legacy becomes something malleable and amorphous. Something to be claimed.

For the time being, Atatürk remains a figure claimed by polarised political sides. A focal point for those seeking to rationalise Turkiye’s evolving society. I doubt his face will be removed from the foothills of the Pontic mountains, nor his statue removed from the centre of Kars. But it remains to be seen whether he will soon represent a golden bygone era or a reality still enjoyed by Turks. Whether he will become a mere spectacle reserved for decorative purposes, hung at remote train stations where people like me wonder who that man is, and what he means.

Image: Flickr/Antonio Tombolini

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