THE arm of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “must not reach into Germany”, says Cem Ozdemir, one of eleven members of Germany’s parliament who have Turkish roots. And yet Turkish politics have erupted onto the streets of Germany. On July 31st almost 40,000 people gathered at a pro-Erdogan demonstration in Cologne organised by the Union of European Turkish Democrats, the international lobby group of Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). The demonstration hinted at the scale of support for Mr Erdogan—and the difficulty German politicians will face when speaking out against him.
About 3m people of Turkish descent live in Germany. Half of those retain Turkish citizenship, making Germany in effect Turkey’s fourth-largest electoral district after Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. Of the roughly 570,000 German Turks who voted in 2015, 60% chose Mr Erdogan’s party, giving him a higher share in Germany than at home. Meanwhile some 2,000 of the country’s 3,000 mosques are Turkish, and 900 of those are financed by DITIB, an arm of the Turkish government, which also sends the imams. Other political groupings are also...Continue reading
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