‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,’ Shakespeare’s Mark Antony declared, before gradually inviting the bloodthirsty crowd before him to lament the loss of Rome’s great general. One senses that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is attempting an inversion of this famous sleight of hand, each time he insists upon his reverence for Turkey’s own military-cum-political leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, before extolling the virtues of the very principles Atatürk fought so hard to eradicate.

This week marks a century since the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate. Largely symbolic though it was – the Turkish Republic had already been willed into existence by Atatürk in late 1923 – the abolition laid the foundation for the establishment of Turkey as the bridge between the East and the West.

President Erdoğan has promised the dawn of a ‘Century of Türkiye’, but implicit in that pledge is a challenge to the Kemalist ideology promulgated by Atatürk which transformed Turkey from an impoverished shadow of the once-great Ottoman Empire to a rising power that exerts an outsized influence over global geopolitics.

Last October, while the nation celebrated the centenary of the Turkish Republic, Erdoğan was conspicuously absent from the festivities. Some commentators have suggested that his lack of enthusiasm was motivated by a desire to eclipse Atatürk as the greatest leader in modern Turkish history. If only it were that simple.

Erdoğan’s muted approach to the commemorations is not rooted in base jealousy or political one-upmanship. It is reflective of the dim view Erdoğan and his supporters take of the secular reforms introduced by Atatürk in the 1920s and 1930s which remain embedded in the Turkish national identity. The clue is in the nuances of Erdoğan’s approach – while he is eager to downplay Atatürk’s significance as a political figure, he is not so shy about leveraging Atatürk’s military achievements to his own advantage.

Atatürk is an epochal figure in Turkey. Literally translated, Atatürk means ‘Father of the Turks’. A glance at his resume leaves little doubt as to whether he earned that sobriquet or his monumental tomb which towers over Ankara. During Atatürk’s fifteen-year rule, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet, granted civil rights to women, did away with conservative dress requirements, and replaced Sharia courts with a modern judicial system.

Keen observers will note that each of Atatürk’s key reforms shared a common theme – a shift away from conservative religiosity and towards secular modernity. Even now, those changes are an anathema to Erdoğan and the supporters of his party, the AKP, who support a revival of the cultural values of the Ottoman Empire and the reunification of church and state.

In many respects, Erdoğan has mastered the art of having his cake and eating it too. Turkey commands enormous sway over Western decision-making, finally acceding to Sweden’s membership of Nato in January (not for nothing – before the ink had dried, Turkey secured the purchase of highly sought-after F16 warplanes from the United States). Meanwhile, Erdoğan has walked a narrow tightrope on the Russia-Ukraine war, supplying Ukraine with weapons while indirectly funding Russian war efforts through lucrative trade agreements and pitching Turkey as essential to efforts to end the conflict.

Try as he might, Erdoğan appears unlikely to enjoy similar success in his efforts to bend Kemalism to his vision for a new Turkish century.