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Roundup: Turkish president to visit Germany, Belgium for election campaign

Xinhua, May 10, 2015 Adjust font size:

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit Germany and Belgium on Sunday to address Turkish expatriates as part of his undeclared campaign to garner votes for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Erdogan will deliver a speech in Germany's Karlsruhe before moving to Belgium's Hasselt to meet with the Turkish community there.

Although the official announcement of his visit was not made yet, Erdogan is not expected to have official meetings with either of the host governments during his visits.

The events were organized by the Union of European Turkish Democrats (UETD), a pan-European organization that is closely aligned with Turkey's ruling AKP.

The UETD President Suleyman Celik said that the Turkish president's visit is aimed to thank citizens in Europe for supporting his last year's presidential bid.

"We hope that the arrival of our president will increase citizens' awareness and participation in the election," he added.

However, Turkish opposition parties accuse Erdogan of violating the constitution, which requires the president to be neutral and sever any connection with a political party.

The Supreme Election Board (YSK) on Tuesday decided to reject a request by the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), which filed a compliant against the president with the Supreme Election Board earlier this week, saying that Erdogan has been violating the constitution and electoral laws by delivering pro-ruling party speeches at a raft of events around the country.

Atilla Kart, a lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), said the decision was wrong because the constitution authorizes the YSK to ensure the safety and fairness of elections.

In his unofficial campaign overseas, Erdogan hopes to sway votes of expats for the ruling AKP, a party he had presided for more than a decade before getting elected as president in last year's elections.

Nearly three million Turks living abroad are eligible to vote and 90 percent of them live in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Around 1.4 million of them are in Germany, while up to one million voters are based in other European countries and a smaller number of voters are in the United States, Asia, Africa and Oceania.

In Austria, 170,000 Turkish nationals are able to vote in the general election, while 92,000 in Switzerland. In Belgium, there are an estimated 130,000 Turkish nationals.

In the presidential election held in August 2014, the first time that Turks were able to vote from overseas, the turnout was lower than expected. Only 10 percent of the registered voters went to the ballot box and votes from abroad made up just five percent of the total result.

Logistical issues and complicated appointment system were cited as the main reason for the low turnout rate.

The YSK canceled the appointment system for June 7 parliamentary elections but did not change the requirement for Turkish citizens living overseas to register beforehand to cast a vote.

Ali Yurttagul, a Turkish analyst, said that other issues persist that will prevent higher participation in this election too.

"The voting in June may be negatively affected as well because the ballot boxes will still be far from voters," he said.

Turkish citizens, including many Turkish nationals in Germany, France, Austria and Belgium, started to vote on Friday at polling stations.

All the four major parties campaigned in Germany and other European cities before. The main opposition party CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu was in Dusseldorf in April, followed by the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli a day later.

HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas met with party representatives in Berlin in March. The AKP leader and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu also visited German city Dortmund last week to meet with his supporters.

The president's campaigning on behalf of the ruling AKP also drew criticism from abroad.

"Serious concerns had been expressed... over the involvement of the president of Turkey in the pre-electoral campaign, despite a clear constitutional provision that he remains without bias while in office," the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, an organization of which Turkey is a long-standing member, said this week. Endit