Turkey's presidential and parliamentary elections have brought more people to the polls abroad than ever before. Until Tuesday evening, the 3.4 million eligible voters were able to cast their votes at Turkey's missions abroad. According to the Turkish news agency Anadolu, voter turnout among Turks abroad has so far been almost 53 percent. They can also vote at border crossings, ports and airports in Turkey until election day on 14 May. In view of the close race between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu, experts expect a high voter turnout among Turks abroad.
Turks living abroad can still vote at border crossings
Othmara Glass
Editor in politics
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In Germany, too, Turks living here took part in the elections with a record turnout. 732,000 of the 1.5 million registered voters in the Federal Republic of Germany cast their ballots by Tuesday evening, according to the Turkish embassy in Berlin. Voter turnout was 48.8 percent.
This is three percentage points more than in the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections, when it stood at 45.7 percent. The ballots will be counted in Turkey and the results will be announced together with those in Turkey. Since an amendment to the electoral law in 2008 and further reforms, Turks residing outside Turkey have been able to cast their votes four years later at specially set up polling stations in their respective country of residence.
Yunus Ulusoy of the Center for Turkish Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen points out that the voter turnout of German-Turks could still rise until Sunday. So far, 126,000 Turks abroad have voted at Turkey's border crossings. Based on the proportion of German-Turks in the number of Turks abroad, he estimates that about 55,000 of these votes come from Germany. If this figure is added to the embassy's figures, the voter turnout of German-Turks is even more than 52 percent.
Özdemir: Facilitate access to the German passport
However, Ulusoy does not expect Kilicdaroglu to benefit from the higher voter turnout in this country. Traditionally, people of Turkish origin in Germany tend to vote for Erdogan. In 2018, he received almost 65 percent of the valid votes, compared to only 53 percent in Turkey.
According to Cem Özdemir (Greens), the high level of approval of many German-Turks for Erdogan is also related to failures in German politics. He spoke out on Wednesday in the "Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung" in favor of making it easier for foreigners living in Germany, and especially Turks, to gain access to German passports. "I would like us to succeed in turning foreigners into nationals if they speak our language, commit themselves to the Basic Law and earn their living here." It is still the case that a large proportion of the children born in Germany to Turkish parents do not receive German citizenship. "That is, we are still producing domestic foreigners."
The Federal Minister of Agriculture referred to his own biography: "I was born in December 1965. I have always spoken Swabian better than Turkish, and yet I have been a Turkish citizen for 18 years of my life – although I have never spent more than six weeks of summer vacation in Turkey." If you tell people long enough, "You're not one of them," they'll behave that way.