He used to invent reasons to travel so that he would not have to be in Turkey on that day. For Islamists of his stripe, it is a persistent nightmare: 10 November, the day the country commemorates the death of Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), known as Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The temperamental, fiery-tongued Recep Tayyip Erdogan always found it hard to utter a kind word about Ataturk, on that occasion or on the occasion of Turkish national day, even though had it not been for the founder of the young secular republic, Erdogan would never have been able to become prime minister and then president. From the moment his star rose in the Anatolian firmament at the beginning of the third millennium, the Islamist politician has worked hard and steadfastly to undermine the foundations of the “heretic” republic and the “Kemalists” that founded it and kept its principles alive. Not that the supporters of Ataturk were the only ones to turn their back on the Ottoman Empire. Hundreds of historians agreed that it had long since deteriorated into a system of despotism and tyranny. But a group of rising politicians armed with a mixture of fundamentalist, reactionary beliefs saw in the sultans of the past a source of pride and an emotive symbol for their irredentist project. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) they founded took a rose-coloured brush to the vestiges of what in the West was termed “The Sick Man of Europe” and constructed a facade for the establishment of a rightist-Islamist system in which there would be no room for critics of any form, especially critics among the defenders of the principles and freedoms of liberal democracy. In the course of the past 15 years they have relentlessly hacked away at the institutions of the republic. Two years ago, the president's wife, Ermine Erdogan, boasted of this process when, alluding to the republic established in 1923, she said that her husband and the party he founded had come to remove “the 90-year wreckage”. Not that Erdogan, himself, would venture to say this openly. But his every action is working in that direction, from the purges of academia, the reordering of the educational system and the expansion in the “Imam Hatip” schools to the massive purges in the judiciary, police and army that were all made possible by the failed coup in mid-July 2016, which Erdogan called “a gift from heaven”. To mark this year's national day, on 29 October, which celebrates the founding of the republic, Erdogan chose to inaugurate Istanbul's third international airport, although it is still incomplete (and despite the fact that hundreds of workers from the site are in jail for having staged a walkout in protest against the harsh working conditions that have led to dozens of worksite deaths there). His obvious purpose was to shift the scene of celebrations from Ankara to the former capital of the theocratic empire on the banks of the Bosporus. It was an expression of the AKP's 90-year resentment that did not escape all other political parties, including the ruling party's current ultranationalist ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). All these parties remained in the modern capital founded by Ataturk to celebrate the day. Despite everything that Erdogan and his clique have done to efface Ataturk from Turkish collective memory, there is no shadow of a doubt that Ataturk's spirit remains alive in the minds of millions of Turks. Just one indication of this is that the opening hours of the Anitkabir, the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had to be extended beyond midnight in order to accommodate the long queues of people who had come to lay flowers on the tomb. Such indications of continued loyalty to the founder of the republic and its principles do not bode well for the founder of the AKP as Turkey heads towards the municipal elections in March, especially given how the ruling party lost its majority hold on parliament in recent snap elections, forcing it into an alliance with the ultranationalist MHP. Undoubtedly Erdogan gritted his teeth at that human bridge to the birth of the republic 95 years ago, even if his media accorded the event only the amount of attention needed to serve as a smokescreen. That bridge consisted of a six-kilometre long line of young men and women carrying wreaths and pictures of Ataturk in a physical embodiment of his declaration to Turkish youth: “You, Turkish Youth, your primary duty is to forever protect and defend Turkish independence and the Turkish Republic. This is the mainstay of your existence and of your future.”