If anywhere in Turkey ought to be an opposition stronghold, it is Sivas. This city of 350,000 people on the high Anatolian plateau, 450km east of Ankara, was the base from which Ataturk’s republican revolution spread to the rest of the country nearly 90 years ago. A ­slogan in gold lettering beside a statue of the nation’s founder, just off the main square, says: “The republic began here.”

A month before Turkey’s general election, however, the republic that Ataturk founded seems to be in retreat in this slightly shabby city.