Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on March 29 filed a lawsuit against the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party claiming he had made “baseless” comments linking him to the self-exiled Muslim cleric Ankara blames for the failed July 2016 coup.

Head of the secular opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) Kemal Kilicdaroglu remarked this week that Erdogan was once closer to Gulen than any other Turkish politician. “The political arm of the Gulenist network is the person who is occupying the presidency,” Kilicdaroglu declared in a speech to CHP members in Ankara. “The number one political arm of the Gulenist network, the number one defendant, is the person who occupies the presidency.”

On March 28, spokesperson for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) Mahir Unal went so far as to refer to the CHP as a national security issue.

The cleric, Fethullah Gulen, was once known as a close ally of Erdogan’s government, but in recent years they had a falling out. Following the attempted military coup, Ankara claimed Gulen’s movement was essentially a terrorist organisation that organised the bid to topple Erdogan. Since then, tens of thousands of people have been detained after being accused of being linked to Gulen’s movement. Purges in the wake of the coup, which are still ongoing, have also seen tens of thousands of people dismissed from their state jobs and the seizure of many businesses accused of being supportive of the “terrorist” Gulenist network.

In the meantime, Washington has angered Ankara by refusing to cooperate with repeated requests for the extradition of Gulen, a resident of rural Pennsylvania since 1999. Gulen strenuously denies any involvement in the abortive coup and In May last year, in a Washington Post opinion piece timed to coincide with an Erdogan visit to the US, he accused the Turkish president of "doing everything he can to amass power and subjugate dissent".

Erdogan’s lawyer Huseyin Aydin dismissed Kilicdaroglu’s accusations against his client. It was patently clear to everyone, he said, that the president was leading the fight against Gulen. Erdogan, he added, was seeking Turkish lira (TRY) 250,000 ($63,000) in damages from Kilicdaroglu.

“We have filed a lawsuit because of Kilicdaroglu’s unfair and baseless accusations directed towards our president,” Aydin said on Twitter.

Erdogan, who has been dominant in Turkish politics for 15 years, first as prime minister and later as president, is strident and intolerant in his determination to remodel Turkey as a Muslim world power, rather than as a secular European power. His ability to reshape the country has been advanced by Turkey’s 20-month-old state of emergency which allows him to rule by decree.

The atmosphere the president’s approach creates in the country of 80 million was demonstrated on March 30 when Bloomberg reported on how a 60-year-old man found himself humiliated on Turkish TV when police forced him to strip down at parliament and remove a t-shirt bearing the image of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern and secular Turkey.

Ataturk’s image may still adorn banknotes, office suites and public buildings across Turkey—and insulting him is technically a crime—but his legacy is being supplanted by the Erdoganist ideology, the news service reported.

Erdogan’s AKP rose to dominance from Turkey’s long-oppressed Islamic political movement and it views parts of Ataturk’s legacy as anti-religious and anti-democratic.

Cafer Dari was the retired worker who wore the t-shirt on his first-ever visit to parliament. Its slogan, previously adopted by anti-government protesters, read: “We’re the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk."

CHP lawmaker Mahmut Tanal argued with police officers in front of TV cameras on behalf of Dari. The visitor to parliament was eventually allowed to put his t-shirt back on. Minutes later, Dari was was seen struggling against tears as he got a hero’s welcome at the Republicans‘meeting hall.

Bloomberg reported the policemen as saying they ordered the shirt removed because of a clause barring certain types of propaganda from parliament. Parliament has launched an investigation.