You Blame Erdoğan for Killing Democracy? Blame Atatürk Too

Erdoğan’s Enduring Rule Amidst Contemporary Unrest

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has ruled Turkey for over 22 years, faced significant challenges to his authority in 2025. These included widespread public unrest sparked by the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, alongside the traditional May 1st demonstrations, during which hundreds were detained for taking part in “unauthorized protests.” Among them were over 100 people who tried to gather in Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square - a site where public demonstrations have been officially banned since 2013. Shortly after these events, Erdoğan surprisingly proposed constitutional amendments widely seen as efforts to further entrench his power and establish legal means to extend his rule.

However, to truly understand Erdoğan’s enduring dominance, we must look beyond immediate events and examine the deeper structural foundations of the Turkish state. Erdoğan is neither an anomaly nor a sudden departure from Turkey’s modern path, but the predictable product of a political system designed from the start to produce leaders like him.

This challenges the widespread belief, both inside Turkey and abroad, that his rise breaks with the founding ideals of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Republic. Instead, Erdoğan’s rule is the logical continuation and culmination of the authoritarian framework embedded in Turkey’s origins.

From Atatürk to Erdoğan: Continuity in Control and Repression

A common misunderstanding is to see Erdoğan’s rise as a sudden break from a previously democratic Turkey. In reality, this view obscures a deeper truth: Turkey’s political system was built on strong authoritarian foundations from the very beginning. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, created a centralized state that restricted dissent and imposed a rigid national identity. The institutions he established were not designed to empower the people, but to control them. They remain rigid, hierarchical, and intolerant structures aimed at enforcing conformity under the banner of national unity and progress.

From the outset, Atatürk’s Turkey was hostile to political pluralism. Opposition parties were quickly dissolved, and anyone who proposed alternative visions faced intimidation, imprisonment, exile, or elimination. The Republic became synonymous with one party, one identity, one voice. This pattern endures today: the media remain under state control and face repression, the judiciary serves the regime, and the military acts as the ultimate guardian of ideological purity.

Atatürk also reshaped Turkish national identity in aggressively exclusionary terms. Minorities were not recognized as integral parts of society but were viewed as existential threats to the national project. The persistent denial of the Armenian Genocide - a stance widely supported across Turkey’s political spectrum - is not mere forgetting but an active rewriting of atrocity into nationalist myth. The Kurds were stripped of their identity, their language banned, and their existence politically erased. Other groups, such as Greeks, Jews, Alevis, and Assyrians, were similarly denied legitimate citizenship. Atatürk’s vision demanded ethnic uniformity, linguistic homogenization, and ideological rigidity. This was not a liberal-democratic unity but coerced sameness - a toxic homogenization that deeply scarred Turkey’s political culture.

Even secularism, often hailed as Atatürk’s greatest legacy, was not a liberation from religion but rather a new authoritarian orthodoxy. The state did not separate itself from religion but instead appropriated and reshaped it to serve its goals. Religious institutions were subordinated to state control, with imams functioning as civil servants whose sermons were dictated by the government. This was neither freedom of religion nor freedom from religion; it was state-controlled religion in a new form. Citizens were not free to believe or disbelieve but were instructed on how, when, and under what conditions belief was permitted.

Admiration for Atatürk has often blinded observers both inside and outside Turkey to the authoritarian nature of his reforms. What he created was not a liberal democracy, but an authoritarian system cloaked in the language and symbols of modernity. Understanding this context is crucial: Erdoğan’s rise is not an aberration or rupture but the predictable culmination of a political system designed to produce leaders like him.

The Persistent Authoritarianism Shaping Turkish Politics

The authoritarian foundations laid by Atatürk shaped every institution of the early Republic, with the military positioned as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy. Far from a neutral force, it intervened whenever citizens strayed from the narrow path dictated by state dogma, sending a clear message: democracy must be restrained not from external enemies, but from its own people.

This authoritarian framework did not end with Atatürk’s death. Successive governments whether leftist, right-wing, secularist, or Islamist have preserved and recycled these mechanisms of control. All have maintained allegiance to the Kemalist legacy in some form. When Erdoğan emerged on the political scene, many believed he represented a break with this tradition. Yet Erdoğan has never been its opposite; rather, he is its logical continuation.

Mastering longstanding instruments of repression - media manipulation, judicial subservience, police enforcement, and military coercion - Erdoğan has simply played by existing rules. Only the facade has changed. Where Atatürk imposed a secular monolith, Erdoğan has installed a religious one. But the underlying architecture of control remains intact.

Today, meaningful change in Turkey is unlikely to come solely through protests or surface-level reforms. Many citizens have had limited exposure to genuine, participatory democracy. From an early age, there is often an emphasis on respecting authority, viewing state control as a norm, and aligning closely with official narratives. This mindset, shaped by a longstanding culture of surveillance and national unity over individual autonomy has roots in the foundational years of the Republic and reflects aspects of Atatürk’s legacy.

It is within this inherited framework that the cult of personality has endured — not just through portraits or slogans, but embedded in the very DNA of the Turkish state. Understanding Erdoğan’s rise, therefore, requires more than a critique of his policies or political tactics; it demands a reckoning with the foundational myths of the Republic and the authoritarian structures they have sustained. Only by confronting these deeper legacies can one begin to imagine a different future for Turkey.

Damir Omerbegović

Writer | Commentator

Find out more