Turkish President Erdoğan was already happy to add fuel to the fire during previous visits to Germany. Now he comes at a heated time. How do the German-Turks react here?
“How can that be?” asks Burak Copur angrily. “How can the federal government repeatedly explain these days how unwaveringly it stands by Israel and that anti-Semitism must have no place in Germany, and then of all things him invite you to a state visit?”
Him of all people. The Turkish president is coming to Germany on a state visit this Friday. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Scholz will receive Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Now of all times. Erdoğan’s previous visits to Germany had already been poisonous. He sometimes told Turks living in Germany that assimilation was a crime, sometimes he opened a mosque and behaved as if he were the Federal Chancellor.
But now, in the midst of the Gaza war and the anti-Semitic wave that has also gripped Germany, the real German Chancellor is receiving a Turkish president who recently praised the Islamic terrorist organization Hamas at a rally as a “group of liberators” that only you defend country. In front of members of his AKP party, he described Israel as a “terrorist state” that wanted to destroy the city of Gaza and all its residents. “The federal government, on the other hand, wants to speak plainly with Erdoğan. Erdoğan just secretly laughs about it. From his point of view, German politicians are not in his league, if at all he takes Biden and Putin seriously on an equal footing,” says Burak Copur.