Instead of undoing Ataturk’s legacy, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed it

NEARLYOF AKAK 60% Turks, including 46% of supporters of the ruling Justice and Development () party, according to a survey published in August, consider him the country’s most beloved historical figure. More than nine out of ten say they are grateful for what he did for Turkey, shows another, less recent poll. And over 73% believe the values he represents are more relevant than ever. Turkey’s president and ’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, though fresh from another election victory this summer, could only dream of such numbers. They are Kemal Ataturk’s. He may have been dead for more than 80 years, but he is still Turkey’s most popular politician.That much will also be clear on October 29th, when Turks celebrate a hundred years to the day when Ataturk, having saved what remained of the Ottoman empire from an invading Greek army and abolished the sultanate, proclaimed the empire’s successor state as a republic. Turkey’s new parliament elected him president only hours later. What followed over the next decade was one of the most thorough, and occasionally ruthless, exercises in nation-building in history. By the time of Ataturk’s death, Turkey had a new alphabet, a new civil code, universal suffrage, and a new state religion, secularism, to go along with the old one, Islam.