The elected official in question actually saw no problem with that. To make matters even "better", he is stuck to communist regime / fascist methodology of tightly controlling television and radio... in the age when everybody is on the Internet... awesome!
I know of another guy, over in Turkey, who works the same way... Ataturk would be turning over in his grave if he saw what that other guy is doing in the country he founded.
Anyway, when is Poland holding the referendum on leaving the european union?
Well Atatürk was not exactly a saint, for example I've just learnt the history of İzmir, which had a large Greek population who had been living there for generation and was relocated to Greece after the Greco-Turkish war.
Some of the events around the revolution and the subsequent foundation of the Turkish Republic would now be considered ethnic cleansing now. And the man is still worshipped in Turkey (at least in parts of the country that don't have an AKP majority). In İzmir there is even a Mount-Rushmore-like statue with his face.
This is not to say that Erdoǧan is better, far from it. But Turkey is a complicated country with a complicated history and talking about Kemalists vs Islamists as if they were good guys vs bad guys is a bit simplistic.