Erdoğan as 12th president and successor to Atatürk

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became the 12th president of the Turkish Republic on Aug. 28 with three ceremonies in Ankara.

At first he took the presidential oath in Parliament. There, the representatives of all state institutions were present and paid their respects, with the exception of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) deputies who walked out, declining to acknowledge Erdoğan’s legitimacy.

Nevertheless, Erdoğan took his oath and left Parliament.

Later in the afternoon, in the Presidential Palace on top of Ankara's Çankaya Hill, Erdoğan took over from his successor Abdullah Gül.

In between, he went to Anıtkabir, to visit the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, through a War of Independence against invading armies amid the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Actually, that stop was not a legal necessity to begin the term in office, but it is a tradition. Atatürk was also the first president of Turkey, who held the post until his death in 1938.

Erdoğan, as a politician coming from a poor family from an old district of Istanbul who made his way up from the streets to the Prime Ministry - and now to become the first popularly elected president of Turkey - has always fought against Kemalist principles throughout his political life.

Kemalism dictates a modernist, Western-oriented system with a clear separation of religion and state. It has been exaggerated by former governments to restrict religious freedoms from time to time.

Erdoğan, meanwhile, graduated from an “imam-hatip,” or Sunni Muslim faith-based secondary school, and considered Kemalism a barrier between the state and the people encouraged...

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