The majority of Turks living in Germany vote for Erdoğan – and nothing has changed in the second round of the presidential election. The incumbent received almost 67 percent of the votes from the electorate in Germany, as reported by the Turkish news agency Anadolu, which is close to the government. The number refers to a count of almost 95 percent of the ballot boxes. However, official figures from the Turkish electoral authorities are not yet available.
An exception is Berlin; the largest Turkish community outside of Türkiye lives here. Just over 100,000 people were eligible to vote in this election. As the broadcaster RBB reports, there is a split picture. 50 percent of the voters would have voted for Erdoğan, 49 percent of the votes went to his challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
It is a tradition that Erdoğan does better in this country than in Turkey. Around 1.5 million German Turks are entitled to vote in Germany. In the run-off election – as in the first ballot – they did not vote on election day on Sunday, but a few days beforehand. They had to cast their votes by last Wednesday.
attitude of protest because of experiences of discrimination
According to experts, the great support that Erdoğan enjoys in the Turkish community can be explained by voter sociology: the majority of the first-generation migrant workers who immigrated to Germany from the Anatolian heartland of Turkey were characterized by socially conservative and traditionally religious attitudes. Not much has changed in this character over the decades.
Erdoğan’s governing party, the AKP, has good structures in Germany today. In many Turkish-speaking households, state-controlled media from Turkey are consumed, most of which report very Erdoğan-friendly. According to Yunus Ulusoy from the Center for Turkish Studies, there are also mainly younger voters in Germany a kind of protest attitude based on experiences of discrimination. They therefore tend to elect a president who confidently insists on Turkey’s independence.
The level of approval for the Turkish President can be seen on Sunday evening in Duisburg or Munich, for example. There, motorcades of Erdoğan supporters are forming. “There are a lot of people on the road. There is a certain joyful excitement,” says a spokesman for the Duisburg police. There are several hundred vehicles and several hundred people on foot. One intervenes “with a great deal of sensitivity” and above all tries to clear the streets for traffic through detours and detours, he said. Occasionally, pyrotechnics were also ignited.
There is a similar parade in Munich. Many Mercedes vehicles with Turkish flags can be seen driving across Leopoldstrasse in Schwabing.