presidential election
German-Turks also clearly for Erdogan in the runoff election
Supporters of Turkish President Erdogan drive in a motorcade with Turkish flags cheering through the north of Duisburg. photo
© Christoph Reichwein/dpa
In 2018, Erdogan received 64.8 percent of the votes from German-Turks. What about the approval rating in the runoff election?
As in the first ballot, a clear majority for Recep Tayyip Erdogan is emerging among eligible voters in Germany in the runoff election for the Turkish presidency.
With around 78.5 percent of the ballot boxes counted from Germany, the incumbent received 67.6 percent of the votes in this group, according to figures from the state news agency Anadolu on Sunday evening.
In the first ballot, he got 65.5 percent of the votes from the German-Turks. Official figures from the electoral authorities on the result of the runoff election in Germany are not yet available.
Erdogan gets a lot of votes from voters in Germany
Erdogan is probably doing significantly better with voters in Germany than overall. According to the state news agency, after counting almost 99 percent of the votes, the Turkish president came to 52 percent, his challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu to 48 percent.
In 2018, Erdogan had already received 64.8 percent of the votes from the German-Turks. According to observers, there are several reasons for Erdogan’s high popularity among this group: Many migrant workers with a religiously conservative attitude came to Germany from the Anatolian heartland of Turkey. Erdogan’s governing party, the AKP, also has good structures in Germany today. According to observers, many households are shaped by Turkish media, much of which is controlled by the government. According to Yunus Ulusoy from the Center for Turkish Studies, there is also a kind of protest attitude, especially among younger voters in Germany, due to experiences of discrimination.
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.