German parties fret about Turkish voters
Erdogan targeting Germany’s Turks ahead of election
BERLIN: Nihan Sen’s grandmother came to Germany in the 1960s but still speaks no German. By contrast, Nihan herself is a star of German youth culture, with 783,000 followers for her YouTube channel. Yet she acknowledges: “I really do like a bit of Turkish television.”
She is not alone. Turkish broadcasters have an 84 percent market share among Germany’s 3 million people of Turkish background, and 40 percent of them watch no German television at all, according to market researcher Data4U.
As a captive audience of television broadcasts from Ankara, Germany’s Turkish citizens are caught in a tug of war for their loyalty ahead of a German national election on Sept. 24.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has called on German voters of Turkish background to reject Germany’s mainstream political parties, saying they are “unfriendly to Turkey.”
The parties worry that Erdogan has more access to Turkish-speaking German voters than they do.
Green Party co-leader Cem Ozdemir, the most prominent German politician of Turkish descent, has called for Germany’s public media to start broadcasting a Turkish channel for the benefit of Turks, both in Germany and in Turkey.
“We need a German-Turkish broadcaster,” he told the Rheinische Post newspaper in March. “For years we’ve neglected to help people from Turkey find a new political homeland, also politically, and now we’re seeing the fruits of that.”
Traditionally, Turks in Germany have voted mainly for the Social Democrats or the Greens, the main center-left parties, which are known for being friendly to immigrants. But Erdogan has repeatedly urged them instead to reject both those parties, as well as Merkel’s ruling conservatives.