He did not stop smiling for the longest time as he looked out at the crowd in front of him, who couldn't stop shouting their joy. The man who won the Turkish presidential election for the third time on Sunday, May 28, has demonstrated a keen sense of politics throughout his life. cv At 69, he has been able to impose his words, feel the zeitgeist better than anyone else and stick to his convictions of the moment. By once again donning the mantle of head of state, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in power since 2003, knows he has reached a milestone, a singular marker in Turkey's turbulent young history.

The passage of the centenary of the Turkish Republic is his, this son of the people, as he likes to describe himself, as are the celebrations of the 100^th anniversary of this Turkey founded, on October 29, 1923, by Mustafa Kemal, later called Atatürk, the "father of the Turks," the "one and only" too. "We have opened the door of the century," he said to applause as he celebrated, attributing his election success to the battles waged "all together" against the opposition, the traitors, the foreign media, the LGBT community and all those, from here and elsewhere, who have set traps and pitfalls. He repeated: "Thanks be to God that I was born to lead this people." And above all: "As I've always said, this march of bliss will never stop, we'll go all the way to the grave together."

The year 2023 has long been on the president's horizon. He also occasionally mentions 2053, the 600^th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople, and 2071, which will mark the millennium of the arrival of the Seljuks in Anatolia. But this centenary date had become his mantra, a sacred formula scarcely dented by a dizzying economic crisis, a devastating earthquake, increasingly sharp criticism of his authoritarian drift and a re-election that ultimately came down to a run-off for the first time.

This was the date that linked with the Ottoman heritage, all too quickly swept aside by the Kemalist government and its thurifers. It was the date that allowed for a vast reinterpretation of history, and nourished the new national narrative so dear to Erdogan, according to which Turkey has a leading role to play in the concert of nations. On the president's website, just a few hours after the newly re-elected leader's walkabout, it was stated: "Turkey's century is a roadmap that will take our country above the level of contemporary civilizations."

Going beyond Atatürk

This says it all. Since his accession, the Turkish president has gradually added to his early pragmatism an ideological anchoring, a form of mystical metaphysics as deeply desired as it is intensely expressed. Exalting the Turkish and Muslim genius, reviving the sultans and certain figures of the Republic, rediscovering the memory of the imperial past and condemning the colonialist West: Over the years, Erdogan has put in place a formidable soft power, a mobilizing narrative based on a manifest dramatization of the national narrative and a neo-Ottoman-inspired desire for rebirth. It's an almost organic fusion of politics, ideology and history, obviously to the detriment of the latter. As recently as October 9, two days after the Hamas attacks on Israel, the president publicly claimed that Palestine had become a place of tension, tears, occupation and pain since the Ottoman Empire withdrew from the region during the First World War.

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