The news put into perspective every Saturday, thanks to the historian Fabrice d’Almeida.
For 20 years at the head of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dreamed of going beyond the role of Kemal Atatürk in history. Because the latter is in everyone’s head. And for good reason, it is the man who straightened by arms, the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, imposed the republic and proclaimed the new Turkey in 1923.
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It is still Mustapha Kemal who modernizes the country, who modifies the language and the alphabet. It introduces a form of secularism to tolerate the Orthodox, Armenian and Alevi religious minorities who have suffered great persecution. It separates the Turkish religion from the state. It accelerated literacy, and even, before France, 11 years earlier, in 1934 it gave women the right to vote.
It is still Mustapha Kemal, in 1934 who adopts a law obliging the Turks to take a surname. Because of his services, the country asks him to be called Atatürk, that is to say “father of the people”. He therefore anchored the country in the West, before dying on November 10, 1938.
A country “under the protection of Allah”
Erdogan has already broken his longevity record, as he was Prime Minister from 2003 to 2014 and then President of the Republic. He has therefore been at the top for 20 years, compared to 16 for Atatürk between 1922 and 1938. But Erdogan dreams of erasing Atatürk’s work. And first of all erase secularism, restore strong links between the State and Islam. Before the National Assembly, in March 2018, he placed the country under the protection of Allah: “They can have tanks, rockets, rockets. They can crush us under technology, it does not matter, we have Allah“, he says. He recites public prayers and his speeches are akin to sermons.
The last difference that opposes him to Kemal Atatürk lies in his desire to reconstitute a kind of caliphate, this mixture of political and spiritual power of the former Ottoman leaders. Erdogan, who dreams of being a spiritual and military leader, wants to reconstitute a greater Turkey with its extended zone of influence. He dreams of himself as supreme leader, as “Commander in Chief” (Baskomutan). This word was the title of a propaganda hit produced in 2016 by a Turkish-Belgian rapper, Ysrafil Yildirim. His re-election allows him to dream about it a little more.