Turkish rifts stir up Germany as referendum nears

It’s a sunny spring day in the German town of Mönchengladbach, and the Turkish cafés are full. For Mürvet Öztürk and her whistle-stop No campaign, it represents a happy hunting ground. Wherever she hears Turkish being spoken in the ethnically diverse city of 255,000 people, Ms Öztürk pounces. “Erdogan wants to change the system — for good,” she says, thrusting “Nein!” leaflets into people’s hands and piling them on shop counters, bars and tabletops. “We have to stop one-man rule!”

Ms Öztürk, a member of parliament in nearby Hessen, is targeting the 1.4m German Turks who are eligible to vote in Sunday’s Turkish referendum. Her aim: to persuade them to reject constitutional changes that will hand more power to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man she says wants to turn Turkey into a dynastic sultanate. She has organised convoys of buses and ride-shares for No voters to local polling stations and tirelessly argued her case on TV talk shows.

It has made her a hate figure among Turkish nationalists. “Whore” and “Zionist stooge” are some of the epithets thrown at her on social media. “Don’t open your door to this traitor,” the pro-government newspaper Sabah warned its readers online.

On the streets of Mönchengladbach, too, the reception can be cool. A waitress called Ayten waves her away: “I’m an absolute Yes voter,” she says. A male colleague says it doesn’t matter what he does — “they’ll rig the results anyway.”

But at the Taeglich restaurant, a Kurdish businessman who gives his name as Bilen tells Ms Öztürk he will definitely vote against the move to extend the president’s power. And he has some contemptuous words for German Turks who back Mr Erdogan. “They’re as bad as the Germans who supported Hitler in the 1930s,” he says. “They have no idea what kind of monster they’re creating.”

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The changes being proposed in the April 16 referendum would essentially grant Mr Erdogan unfettered power, giving him sole authority to appoint and dismiss government ministers and dissolve parliament, and handing him greater control over judicial appointments. It comes with Turkey’s opposition already cowed by the wave of repression unleashed after July’s failed coup, which saw mass arrests and purges of suspected plotters, dissidents and government critics. But the referendum is also reverberating far beyond Turkey’s borders. Mr Erdogan has taken his campaign deep into the heart of Europe, making a direct appeal to millions of Turkish voters in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and elsewhere to back his pursuit of an executive presidency.

In Germany at least, his calculation makes electoral sense. While polls suggest the vote will be close at home, Mr Erdogan can count on strong support in Germany, home to the largest Turkish population outside the country, and a stronghold of his ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party: in the 2015 parliamentary elections, it won almost 60 per cent of votes cast there, compared with 49.5 per cent overall.

The enthusiasm was palpable at the Turkish consulate in Düsseldorf, one of 13 sites around the country where between March 27 and last Sunday Turks were able to vote in the plebiscite. Whole families queued to cast their ballots, women in headscarves, children eating ice cream; the mood festive.

“The US has had a presidential system for more than 200 years. Why shouldn’t we have one too?” asks Cafer Bas, a clerical worker. Anything that strengthened the rule of the AKP, he says, is a good thing: “They have really turned things round in Turkey, investing in health, education, kindergartens. That government is working for the people.”

But the campaign has also dragged Germany’s Turks into an ideological struggle that is creating rifts in the community, some so deep they may never heal. The tensions began to intensify straight after last year’s attempted putsch, which Ankara blamed on the exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen: suspected Gulen sympathisers in Germany found themselves ostracised and verbally abused, their car tyres slashed and businesses boycotted. Later it was revealed that Turkish intelligence had snooped on hundreds of German Gulen supporters and passed on their names to the authorities in Berlin, fuelling paranoia among anti-Erdogan Turks.

Emerging from the Düsseldorf consulate, Elif Kiskan, a student, says she has never seen the Turkish community so split. “Even good friends have called me a ‘traitor’ because I don’t support Erdogan,” she says. “People say I can’t really be a Turkish woman.”

Ms Kiskan, who asked that her real first name not be used, says Turks used to be much more unified. “Now people ask you if you’re Sunni, or a Kurd, or Alevi Shia,” she says. “There’s this sense that they, AKP supporters, are the majority, and you have to fall in line.”

That picture is disputed by Erdogan loyalists. “The Turkish community in Germany has never been homogeneous,” says Fatih Zingal, deputy head of the Union of European Turkish Democrats, an EU-wide lobby group which has close links to the AKP. He lists some of the factions: pious Muslims, secular Kemalists, extreme leftwingers and supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ party or PKK. “The spectrum of political views has always been very broad.”

Yet the referendum campaign threatens not only to deepen those divisions — it could also cause a rift between Turkey and Germany , two Nato partners bound by decades of close economic and political ties. When a number of German cities refused to let Turkish ministers hold campaign rallies last month, a squabble erupted that pitched the countries into a diplomatic crisis. Mr Erdogan accused the authorities of Nazi-like practices, triggering howls of protest in Berlin.

Tensions were already running high over the detention of Deniz Yücel, a German-Turkish journalist working for Die Welt, who is accused by the Turkish authorities of “terror propaganda” and incitement.

One Turkish-German MP, Cemile Giousouf, demanded Mr Erdogan apologise to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, for the Nazi comment. In response she received a wave of death threats, two of which are being investigated by German police.

Ms Giousouf is used to it: she was placed under police protection last year after backing a Bundestag motion branding the massacres carried out by Ottoman Turks against Armenians in the first world war as a genocide. Mr Erdogan demanded German MPs of Turkish origin who had voted for the resolution submit to blood tests. “The Turkish propaganda machine has totally radicalised people,” she says.

Burak Çopur, a political scientist and Turkey expert at Duisburg-Essen University, says he fears the inflammatory talk out of Ankara could “feed anti-Turkish sentiment in German society”. According to a recent poll by German TV channel ZDF, 61 per cent of Germans think recent political developments will “badly affect” relations between Germans and Turks in Germany.

Germans are already voting with their feet. Advance sales of package tours to Turkey this summer have halved compared with 2016. “It’s presumably a mixture of concerns about security and the tensions between Germany and Turkey, as well as the general political situation,” says Ellen Madeker of the German Tourism Association.

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The Turkish community in Germany has its roots in a recruitment agreement between Ankara and Bonn in 1961, which paved the way for thousands of Turkish Gastarbeiter or guest-workers to take up jobs with German companies. The Wirtschaftswunder, Germany’s postwar economic miracle, had created an acute labour shortage, exacerbated by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 which prevented workers migrating from the communist east.

The government had never expected the Gastarbeiter to stay, and initially barred them from bringing family members to Germany. But eventually such restrictions were lifted, and many put down roots in their new homeland, gaining full German residency rights and, ultimately, citizenship. They were later joined by leftwing intellectuals and Kurds fleeing Turkey in the wake of the 1980 military coup.

Turks now make up the largest ethnic minority in the country. Yet studies show they have integrated less well into German society than other immigrant groups. They tend to be poorer, with lower monthly household income than migrants from, say, the former Yugoslavia or eastern Europe, and their children are less likely to graduate from high school or university. Unemployment and welfare dependency also tend to be higher than in other ethnic groups.

As a result many Turks feel alienated and excluded from German society, a feeling only made worse by the souring of relations with Ankara. “A lot of people complain of discrimination, and feel they don’t really belong here,” says Sevil Özer, head of a secular German-Turkish non-governmental organisation called “Marching to a Different Beat”.

Mr Erdogan has, she says, capitalised on this disaffection, presenting himself as a benefactor who “listens to their concerns and sticks up for them”. She adds: “That’s why they love it when he socks it to the Germans — they feel somehow validated.”

It could, however, worsen the Turks’ sense of alienation. “Erdogan is undermining all the efforts made over the years to integrate Turks into German society,” says Mr Çopur.

The president’s interventions have not only alarmed moderate Turks: they are also a huge problem for Ms Merkel.

The German chancellor, who is running for a fourth term in elections this year, is still under pressure after allowing more than 1m refugees into the country since 2015. That influx was stemmed largely thanks to the refugee deal clinched between the EU and Turkey last year. However, some say the deal made her too reliant on Mr Erdogan, preventing her from taking a strong stance on the president’s Nazi accusations and the incarceration of Mr Yücel. The anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) accuses her of “kowtowing” to Turkey even as it lurches to authoritarianism.

It is a point echoed by the Istanbul-born writer and director Serdar Somuncu, who said in a recent TV talk-show that the migrant deal had left Germany open to blackmail by Ankara. “Do you think that if Erdogan opens the floodgates again, Merkel can win the election?” he asked. That was one of the reasons, he argued, that Europe had no clear policy on Turkey, despite the human rights abuses being perpetrated there since the failed coup.

Back at the consulate in Düsseldorf, Köksal Topallas, a foreman at steelmaker ThyssenKrupp, says he and his entire family will vote Yes. The constitutional changes are needed to banish the spectre of “weak government” that he says is Turkey’s curse.

Kadriye, an electoral observer from the opposition CHP party, who declined to give her surname, looks on in despair. She has tried and failed to mobilise No voters, but finds “they’re all pretty apathetic: they say they can’t change anything, so why bother”.

In contrast, the Yes voters at the polling stations were fired up. “A lot of them don’t even know what they’re voting for, but they have this blind faith in Erdogan,” she says. “They don’t know what they’re letting themselves in for.”