The Other Turkish Voters Who Could Be Crucial

BERLIN—Five years ago, Turkish voters in Germany overwhelmingly backed incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his bid for reelection. This time around, Erdogan is facing the toughest campaign of his political career—and some of the votes he needs to stay in power may be cast not in Turkey but thousands of miles away, at a consulate here in the German capital and a handful of other polling places across Germany.

Read more of FP’s coverage of Turkey’s pivotal elections.

Turkey’s highly anticipated presidential and parliamentary elections this weekend have the potential to reshape the country’s political landscape: For the first time in two decades, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) aren’t a sure bet to win. The main opposition alliance, led by presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, is running neck and neck with Erdogan in the polls.

That means Erdogan is looking for every bit of support he can get—and, at least last time around, Turkish diaspora voters in Germany delivered. Even though Erdogan won about 53 percent of votes overall in the 2018 presidential election, two-thirds of diaspora voters in Germany backed him. In some areas, including the industrial Ruhr valley in western Germany, experts say that figure reached as high as 75 percent.

Around 1.5 million people living in Germany are Turkish citizens and eligible to vote in this weekend’s elections. As of the end of overseas voting on Tuesday, estimates show that nearly half of them, or more than 700,000, had cast their ballots. It may not seem like a lot when the overall Turkish electorate numbers more than 60 million, but in a close race, it could help tip the scales for Erdogan (especially if past is prologue regarding his appeal to diaspora voters) or for Kilicdaroglu. Local supporters of Kilicdaroglu and the Turkish opposition believe increased turnout this time around—they estimated votes were up by more than 20 percent in Berlin compared with 2018, for example—could mean they have a shot at narrowing the margin with Erdogan in Germany.

As a result, both camps have been courting diaspora voters, especially in a country like Germany, where there are so many of them. The Turkish government asked to set up 26 polling places at consulates and other locations around Germany, hoping to make voting more convenient for Turkish citizens here; Germany approved 16 of them. The opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has spent six months trying to convince undecided voters and mobilize those who hadn’t voted in the past. Meanwhile, Erdogan posters went up in the southern city of Nuremberg late last month, causing controversy among local German politicians.

“Erdogan is feeling threatened for the first time, and how is he responding? By redoubling his efforts to get out the diaspora vote,” said Michael L. Miller, the head of nationalism studies at Central European University. “He recognizes he’s not going to get those votes domestically or that they’re going to be much lower domestically—so he wants to get as many of these [diaspora] votes as possible.”

Germany’s sizable Turkish population is a direct result of immigration in recent decades: Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, waves of so-called guest workers from Turkey, Italy, Spain, Morocco, and other countries came to Germany to help rebuild in the aftermath of World War II. Many of them, including millions of Turkish citizens, chose to stay in Germany and build lives and families. As a result, the Turkish state slowly but surely recognized the potential payoffs from engaging with Turkish citizens abroad and building up a diaspora community and identity. The Turkish state established a special government department for Turks living abroad and invested, both financially and organizationally, in setting up networks of Turkish organizations around Germany. 

“During the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there had gradually been more involvement from the Turkish state [among diaspora members],” said Sezer Idil Gogus, a doctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt who focuses on engagement efforts among the Turkish diaspora in Germany. Erdogan kicked that up a notch.

“During the AKP period, it has intensified, and it has become more institutionalized,” she said. 

Like many countries, Turkey for a long time did not have the infrastructure in place for external voting: Turkish citizens living abroad who wished to cast votes had to physically return to the country to do so. It wasn’t until the early 2000s, once Erdogan had taken office as prime minister, that he and his allies realized that members of the Turkish diaspora were an untapped electoral resource. The 2014 election was the first in which members of the diaspora could vote abroad at consulates, it was the vote that made then-Prime Minister Erdogan president, and it was the first direct vote for Turkey’s president.

“When the AKP came to power, it recognized there was a potential here they might be able to use and that this potential could ultimately be instrumentalized in a particular direction or mobilized politically,” said Kemal Bozay, a professor with the Center for Radicalization Research and Prevention in Essen, in western Germany. “In the time since, the [different political] parties are paying more attention to this potential.”

There are several reasons for Erdogan’s strength among diaspora voters in Germany. Many of the people who came to Germany as guest workers came from poorer parts of Turkey with more conservative backgrounds, making them more politically in line with Erdogan’s brand of Islamic nationalism than the opposition. Then there’s the discrimination those of Turkish origin often face in German society. 

“When someone is excluded from and stigmatized by this society and has had experiences with discrimination or racism,” Bozay said, they’re far more likely to engage politically back in Turkey and to vote for Erdogan. 

It is, Miller said, a classic example of diaspora nationalism: Members of a diaspora living outside their homeland sometimes take more radical political stances than those back home, since they don’t have to live with the consequences. For Turkish citizens in Germany who feel alienated from German politics and society, the brand of Turkish nationalism established by Erdogan offers another way for them to seek identity and engagement.

These voters are “in some cases living vicariously through the Turkish state,” Miller said. “They don’t have to deal with the consequences of the AKP’s policies. They don’t have to deal with the consequences of this form of Turkish nationalism in Turkey.” 

Turkey isn’t the only country where diaspora nationalism plays a role in boosting nationalist leaders: Ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries such as Romania, who were granted citizenship by Prime Minister Viktor Orban in 2011, vote overwhelmingly for his Fidesz party. In other cases, the diaspora vote is more progressive: Moldova’s pro-European Union president, Maia Sandu, was elected in 2020 in part due to strong support from Moldovans living abroad.

Still, even though they came out strong for Erdogan five years ago, the Turkish diaspora in Germany is not a monolith, Gogus said. Those who have German citizenship but not Turkish citizenship can’t vote in the Turkish elections in any event. 

“The people who go to vote, who have Turkish citizenship and are very passionate about going to vote, we can make this generalization that they have stronger emotional ties to Turkey and maybe are more likely to vote for the AKP,” she said. “But it’s not representative—at the end of the day, there are so many Turkish-origin people with different backgrounds who don’t even go to vote.”

That’s what Kenan Kolat, the head of the CHP’s chapter in Berlin, was trying to change a few days before the polls closed overseas. Kolat said the CHP started its campaign-related activities six months ago with public discussions about Turkish politics and the opposition’s election platform. Since then, they’ve distributed tens of thousands of flyers, run a campaign to get new voters registered, and opened six campaign offices around Berlin. As he spoke, Kolat waved to the driver of a minivan with an image of Kilicdaroglu plastered across both sides. The CHP’s Berlin chapter is sponsoring seven of these buses to bring voters from different parts of town, four times a day, to the Turkish Consulate in western Berlin. 

Convincing die-hard Erdogan voters to switch to the CHP is often a lost cause, “but we can convince people who aren’t so decided or who remain undecided,” Kolat said. “Here, it’s about mobilization—we need to show our voters that they should turn out to vote.”

Now, all that’s left is the counting. Results should be in before the end of Sunday. “We have to wait and see, of course—the other side is also mobilizing its voters,” Kolat said.