Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the most influential leader in Turkey since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Michael Rubin wrote in his National Interest article.
"While Atatürk sought to tie Turkey to the West, Erdoğan has worked to reorient Turkey instead to the Islamic world. He built a palace, fifty-eight-times the size of the White House, where he lives like a Sultan. Indeed, that may his goal as he increasingly promotes his own family over party. Erdoğan demands respect. He surrounds himself with courtiers who praise him constantly and imprisons those whose criticize him. While Erdoğan sees himself as larger than life, the true measure of how Turks view him will become apparently only after his death.
Erdoğan’s demise is a topic about which Turks increasingly speculate. On February 24, Erdoğan will turn sixty-seven. He has had multiple health scares. In 2006, he passed out in a locked, armored car causing panic among his desperate bodyguards. A decade ago, Erdoğan underwent surgery for colon cancer. In 2017, he fainted while praying at a mosque. He is also allegedly an epileptic. Nor can Erdoğan be certain about a peaceful death. Every democrat awakes knowing when his term in office expires; dictators awake recognizing on some level that any day could be their last. Erdoğan may get his state funeral, but he also may live out his final days in exile.
How might Turks honor Erdoğan after his death? Turkey often treats its leader with more respect after they die than when they were alive. Turkey has long been politically polarized. Over the decades, party gangs have done battle on the streets as their leaders sometimes came to blows in the parliament, but partisan animosity toward leaders fade with time.
The most respected figure in Turkey remains Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who founded the modern republic almost a century ago. His mausoleum, the Anıtkabir, towers above a leafy neighborhood in central Ankara. Prior to Ankara’s explosive growth, residents across the hilly city could, like a modern acropolis, see it. Tourists, school groups, diplomats, and visiting military delegations continue to visit it and the same-complex tomb of Atatürk successor İsmet İnönü on an almost daily basis.
Atatürk’s shrine might be the largest, but he is not the only Turkish leader honored with a mausoleum. In 1960, the military ousted Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, who led Turkey through the 1950s, and executed him the following year. While they initially buried him in a small plot within the shadow of İmralı, Turkey’s highest-security prison, Turkish authorities ultimately rehabilitated him and constructed a mausoleum in Istanbul where he now rests. Menderes’ colleague Celâl Bayar, president at the time of the 1960 coup and sentenced to life imprisonment by the same court that condemned Menderes, served only three years, and died in 1986 at age 103. The Turkish government honored him with a museum and mausoleum in Bursa.
One of modern Turkey’s most famous statesmen was Süleyman Demirel, who rose to power in 1965, ruled Turkey for the next six years, and returning to power three subsequent times against the backdrop of political instability over the next decade, and then once more in the early 1990s as head of the True Path Party. Widely respected, he became president of Turkey in 1993 and led in that capacity into the new millennium. When Demirel died at ninety years old, he was buried in Atabey, the town of his birth where the Turkish government subsequently constructed a mausoleum.
Nor was he alone. Turgut Özal, whose center-right Motherland Party dominated Turkish politics for a decade after the return to civilian rule in 1983, was laid to rest (twice) with honors at a mausoleum near Topkapı Palace in central Istanbul.
Erdoğan revels in the image of a pious Muslim but, behind closed doors, eschews the ascetic life. Whereas Erbakan requested a simple funeral, if Erdoğan’s 1,000-room residence is any indication, he will expect far more.
Vengeance might also sully Erdoğan’s desire for post-mortem honor. Erdoğan is Turkey’s most hated man. The hundreds of thousands who he has fired, imprisoned, or revoked pensions from will not soon forgive him.
Erdoğan’s tenure as prime minister and president have shown Turks and the world that he is a fragile, thin-skinned, venal man, more content to crush dissent than win a policy debate on its merits. Over the course of his career, he has not only antagonized many Turks, but he has also made himself persona non grata among regional states and Turkey’s traditional allies. He may believe his legacy will be as a second Atatürk, but visitors may be sparse. After all, it is difficult for Turkish students to easily visit shrines in Azerbaijan, Qatar, or Somalia," Rubin wrote.
