Anadolu Agency (AA) Turkey
 Friday


Turkish immigrant party gets ready for German election


BERLIN

As Germany's federal elections draw closer, a new party -- recently
formed by ethnic-Turkish citizens -- is hoping to make a breakthrough
into national politics.

The Alliance of German Democrats (AD-D) won 14,000 votes in May's
regional election in the northern state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Although it has little chance of getting close to Germany's five
percent electoral threshold in Sunday's federal contest, they still
view it as an opportunity to give a strong message to the traditional
parties.

"We are not professional politicians, but ordinary citizens who are
frustrated with growing anti-Turkish sentiment in Germany in recent
years," AD-D's co-founder and secretary general Halil Ertem tells
Anadolu Agency.

"In the federal elections on Sunday, we are hoping to significantly
increase our support. But our real work will start on Monday. Our
primary goal will be to win seats at the European Parliament elections
in 2019," he says.

According to Ertem, AD-D has a good chance of winning several seats at
the European Parliament elections, as there will be no threshold and
nearly 180,000 votes would be enough for a candidate to be elected.

Among the three million people with Turkish roots in Germany, half of
them have German citizenship. Approximately 800,000 ethnic-Turkish
citizens are eligible to vote, according to estimates.

Erdogan posters

Although Turkish immigrants were less interested in German elections
in previous years, recent political tensions between Berlin and Ankara
has increased their interest in the federal elections.

Ertem says their party received greater attention among Turkish
immigrants in recent days, after it decided to use posters of Turkey's
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in its election campaign.

Erdogan, an outspoken critic of Germany's illiberal integration
policies, has also been a very popular figure among a majority of
Turkish immigrants.

The Turkish president last week criticized Germany's mainstream
parties for adopting anti-Turkish rhetoric, and has called on his
countryman to back parties who were not hostile to Turkey.

"We love President Erdogan and we respect him," Ertem says, but also
underlined that their party AD-D had no ties with any political party
in Turkey and remained open to all Turkish immigrants, who shared
their principles.

"We have had no discussions with any Turkish official, and received no
support from Turkey, neither during the foundation of our party last
year, nor during our planning work for our campaign ahead of the
federal elections," he stresses.

Against mainstream parties

AD-D was founded in August 2016, a few weeks after the German
parliament's controversial motion which described the deaths of
Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as "genocide".

Ertem said the one-sided motion, which neglected suffering on the
Turkish side, caused uproar among the members of the Turkish
community.

"None of the 11 ethnic-Turkish lawmakers from the mainstream parties
opposed this motion. Just for the sake of their political career, they
couldn't dare to contradict their party line," he said.

Ertem argued that mainstream parties have so far failed to address the
real concerns of the immigrant population, and did not take serious
measures against growing racism and discrimination against German
citizens with an immigrant background.

He accused them of adopting anti-Turkey, anti-Erdogan rhetoric.

"After all that, we have said enough is enough and decided to found
our party, the Alliance of German Democrats," he said.

AD-D is not the first party founded by immigrants in Germany.

In 2010, a group of migrants led by ethnic-Turkish citizens, founded
the Alliance for Innovation and Justice (BIG).

However, the party could not get more than 18,000 votes in federal
elections in 2013.

BIG decided to boycott the federal elections this year, in order to
protest mainstream parties, which it accused of becoming anti-Turkish
and drifting into populism.

Rise of the far-right

Germany has witnessed growing racism in recent years, triggered by the
propaganda of far-right parties which have effectively used the
Internet to disseminate extremist views and fake news on the refugee
crisis.

The rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was
polled at around 10 percent in recent polls, has been a widespread
concern.

In 2013, AfD failed to pass the five percent threshold and could not
enter the Bundestag, the German parliament.

Since the refugee crisis in 2015, the party adopted an explicit
anti-immigrant as well as anti-Islamic rhetoric and significantly
increased its support.

In a recent poll released by the GMS institute on Thursday, AfD came
in at 10 percent.

The poll put Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic bloc at
37 percent, while the Social Democratic Party (SPD) polled at 22
percent.

Germany, a country of 81.8 million people, has the second-largest
Muslim population in Western Europe after France.

Among the country's nearly 4.7 million Muslims, three million are of
Turkish origin. Many of them migrated to Germany in the 1960s.