Turkey voted. Turkish citizens and people of Turkish origin are following the count in Stuttgart with great excitement. First votes of a long evening of elections.
“Confusing” – that is the word of the Wahlat evening. Even hours after the polling stations closed Türkiyethere was a lack of clarity as to who was ahead in the presidential race: the incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Kemal Kilicdaroglu of the left-leaning CHP, who is backed by five conservative parties. A similar picture emerged from the parliamentary elections taking place at the same time.
“If Erdogan wins, Turkey will slide further towards autocracy”
Spellbound also followed in Stuttgart many Turks and politicians of Turkish origin spent election evening and election night. So does the President of the Landtag Reverend Aras (Green). She was hoping for a victory for the challenger. On Sunday evenings, she and her husband Sami keep switching back and forth between the TV channels. “It was very frustrating at first because Erdogan was clearly ahead,” she says on the phone at 9:30 p.m.
But the longer the evening, the more the columns of numbers become the same. For Aras, who came to Germany with her parents from Turkey when she was twelve, it would be “disappointing and sad” if Erdogan were to stay ahead in the end. “I sincerely hope that things will turn out differently and that Kilicdaroglu wins,” she says – at the latest in a possible runoff election that would take place in two weeks. If Erdogan asserts himself, Turkey will, in her view, “slide further towards autocracy”.
More rights for the Turkish parliament?
The fact that a wide range of parties have forged a broad alliance against him shows the Green politician “how much people are suffering from the current situation”. She recalled that the elections were “not fair and equal” because Erdogan and the ruling AKP dominated the media. As the speaker of the parliament, she expressly supports the efforts of the challenger Kilicdaroglu to give the Turkish parliament more rights again, she says: “A change would also be important for Europe”.
For Danyal Bayaz (Greens), the Heidelberg-born, Turkish-born finance minister of Baden-Württemberg, the situation on the evening of the election is also completely confusing: “The interim results in the state media cannot be trusted. You have to be very careful,” he says. “That’s why no serious evaluation is possible tonight.” A runoff election is not unlikely. “And that in turn means that Erdogan’s power is crumbling.”
The Ludwigsburg member of parliament Macit Karaahmetoglu (SPD), who has lived in Germany since he was twelve, is in good spirits despite the many ambiguities. “I believe that Kemal Kilicdaroglu will win the race,” he said when asked. In previous elections, the AKP was initially much further ahead. In places where the opposition is in the lead, Erdogan has repeatedly lodged objections, so that these results can only be included in the election statistics with a delay. A transparent maneuver for Karaahmetoglu: “Edogan pulls out all the stops. He’s trying to buy time and putting the opposition under pressure.”
For Gökay Sofuoglu, from Stuttgart and chairman of the Turkish community in Germany, everything on the evening of the election indicates “that there will be a runoff election”. He experiences the election evening with “mixed feelings”, as he says. “I wish for a change, but I wasn’t as euphoric as some others.” If things turn out differently, you have to accept that. In the days leading up to the vote, Erdogan skilfully used his emotions to make politics and played the nationalist and religious card.
Opposition supporters meet in Esslingen on election night
Kerim Arpad, chairman of the German-Turkish Forum in Stuttgart, is experiencing a “crazy election evening” on his mobile phone. Within three hours, the numbers had shifted by more than ten percent, he says. For him, it was confirmed on Sunday evening how divided Turkey is at the moment. Regardless of the outcome of the election, the difficulty is bringing people back together.
On Sunday afternoon in Esslingen, almost 100 supporters of the opposition CHP met in the restaurant Arkadasch, in German “friend”, to follow together how the “dictator Erdogan” is being voted out, as one of the organizers of CHP Württemberg eV, Nazan Kilic, says . “The mood is good, initially Erdogan led, now it’s a neck-and-neck race.” That’s the situation around 9:45 p.m.: “We have great hope and are sure that we will provide the next president,” says the native of Esslingen.
Many of the CHP members who are sitting together in the Arkadasch restaurant on election night have been working as voluntary election observers at the polling station in Zuffenhausen over the past few days. The party of state founder Kemal Atatürk had mobilized up to 100 people in shifts every day at the 20 polling booths. According to Nazan Kilic, there were no irregularities. Only in one case did someone who was not entitled to vote vote. But that has been corrected.
Rally without rally participants
Around 150,000 Turkish citizens who are eligible to vote live in Württemberg. Between April 27 and May 9, they were asked to cast their votes in a building of the Turkish consulate in Zuffenhausen. The participation was lively. “Higher than in the last election in 2018,” suspects Nazan Kilic. At that time, around 55.2 percent of the registered Turkish voters voted in Stuttgart. In the Baden part of the country, where around 90,000 Turks are entitled to vote, 44.6 percent took part at the time.
The only clear thing on this election night seems to be the situation on Stuttgart’s Schlossplatz. A rally had been registered from the Kurdish spectrum critical of Erdogan. It was empty except for two riot police cars.