Merkel: Germany must not let Turkey ‘grow more distant’ Turkish FM hands German counterpart list of more planned rallies despite row
ISTANBUL: Turkey is planning more rallies in Germany ahead of a crunch referendum in April, its foreign minister said Thursday, despite an acrimonious row with Berlin after local authorities banned several campaign events.
Mevlut Cavusoglu said he had already handed a list of the planned rallies to his German counterpart Sigmar Gabriel.
“We expect Germany to solve this problem. We are planning around 30 rallies. We had informed German authorities of them all,” said the minister in quotes carried by private CNN-Turk television.
Turkey and Germany have been at loggerheads this week after local authorities blocked several rallies by Turkish ministers.
On Sunday, Erdogan poured oil on the fire, telling a rally in Istanbul that the blocking of public appearances by his ministers was “not different from the Nazi practices of the past.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel hit back earlier Thursday at the Turkish leader’s Nazi jibe as “sad” and “depressing.”
Cavusoglu stressed it was “out of the question” for Turkey to call the German government Nazi.
“This is a very sensitive issue. We are not calling the current administration Nazi,” he said, clarifying that the current bans “unavoidably remind us the practices during that (Nazi) period.”
Cavusoglu also said that politicians and the German media had referred to Erdogan as a “dictator.”
Merkel said that Germany wants to patch up frayed ties with Turkey, but without compromising its democratic principles or accepting “Nazi” jibes.
“As difficult as everything is at the moment, as unacceptable as some things are, it can not be in our security and geopolitical interest that Turkey, a NATO partner after all, grows even more distant from us,” she told Parliament.
Merkel vowed to “work for German-Turkish relations, on the basis of our values and in all clarity” — stressing that these included the freedoms of speech, the press and assembly.
Merkel said such rhetoric belittled Holocaust victims and was “so out of place as to be unworthy of serious comment.”
On future rallies, she said: “We continue to view such appearances by Turkish government representatives as possible as long as they are duly announced, in a timely manner, and in an open way, so that they can be approved.”
The row is the latest to plague relations, following spats over a German TV comedian’s biting satire targeting Erdogan and, more recently, Ankara’s arrest of a journalist with the German daily Die Welt.
Merkel vowed that her government would do “everything in its power” to work for the release of the journalist, Deniz Yucel, who is being held on terrorist propaganda charges.
Germany is home to a large community of Turks who have settled in Europe’s biggest economy, the legacy of a “guest worker” (“Gastarbeiter”) program dating to the 1960s and 70s.
Over the past year Germany — which has taken in about 1 million refugees and migrants since 2015 — has also banked on an EU agreement with Turkey that has sharply reduced the influx of newcomers.
“There are few countries with which we have ties this complicated but also this varied” as with Turkey, said Merkel.
“Mrs. Merkel is right, we have profound disagreements on some issues. For example, the fight against terror,” Turkey’s presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said Thursday.
The spokesman also criticized other European countries like Austria where Chancellor Christian Kern has called for a ban on Turkish politicians from politically campaigning across the EU.
“We have a very clear message: Do not work in vain, the people will decide, not you,” Kalin said.