Mustafa Yeneroglu used to be a fiery advocate of the Turkish president. On German television, he accused Recep Tayyip Erdogan's critics of hysteria and ignorance. When more than 2016,77 people were arrested after the 000 coup attempt, he said on Deutschlandfunk: "The rule of law works." He justified the state of emergency by saying that a strong state was needed to protect an open society.
Friederike Böge
Political correspondent for Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan based in Ankara.
- Follow I follow
The lawyer, who grew up in Cologne, was an AKP member of Ankara's parliament for four years. One of his tasks was to mobilize Turkish voters in Germany for Erdogan. Also in 2017 for the referendum that introduced the presidential system in Turkey. The aim of the constitutional amendment was to "strengthen pluralistic democracy," Yeneroglu claimed at the time.
The opposite happened. Erdogan concentrated even more power in his hands and acted even more unscrupulously against dissenters. Yeneroglu was not afraid to dish himself out. When the moderator Maybrit Illner asked him whether anyone in Turkey could still criticize the president without having to fear arrest, he snapped at her, saying she had no idea about the situation in Turkey.
In the meantime, one hears different tones from Mustafa Yeneroglu. He was "deeply ashamed" and reproached himself, he told the F.A.S. "I couldn't look my children in the face anymore," he said in an earlier interview. The Cologne election campaign against Erdogan is currently underway. It is part of the mission to change power, in which six parties have joined forces.
Yeneroglu is disappointed with the German-Turks
Yeneroglu now says things about the president like: "He determines at will who is in prison and who gets out." As a candidate of the DEVA party, the German-Turk is fighting for the reintroduction of the parliamentary system he once helped to abolish. He finds it "extremely regrettable," he says, "that the majority of voters of Turkish origin in Germany continue to vote for Erdogan, despite the bad things he has done in recent years." His resignation from the AKP was three and a half years ago.
Many former companions have turned their backs on Erdogan. Initially celebrated as an Islamic democrat, his style of government became increasingly authoritarian. Former President Abdullah Gül was one of the founding members of the AKP in 2001 along with Erdogan. Today he is one of his most prominent critics. Former Foreign and Economy Minister Ali Babacan founded the Deva party in 2020. Former Foreign Minister and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu founded the Future Party. Erdogan increasingly surrounded himself with loyalists. There was little room for people who dared to contradict him.
For someone like Yeneroglu, it was hard to bear. "This is a question of socialization," he said in his resignation statement in November 2019. There are many in the party who think like him. Unlike them, however, he could not remain silent. "I wasn't brought up in an authoritarian education system."
It is easy to believe that he was already at odds with his party when he was still the apologist on German talk shows and skilfully twisted the word in the mouths of critics. After all, as chairman of the Human Rights Commission in the Turkish parliament, the lawyer was confronted with the gap between propaganda and reality on a daily basis. Six months before leaving the party, he wrote on Twitter that the indictment against Osman Kavala, a cultural promoter who has since been sentenced to life imprisonment, contained no evidence. He reprimanded the imprisonment of the "Welt" journalist Deniz Yücel. And he publicly criticized Erdogan for not wanting to accept his party's defeat in the 2019 mayoral election in Istanbul.