German intelligence agencies have been closely monitoring the activities of groups linked to Turkey’s ruling People’s Alliance ahead of the forthcoming elections, for their extremist nationalist, anti-semitic, racist and far-right ideology, Deutsche Welle reported on Friday.
The German authorities have for years been following organisations linked to the Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s far-right allies Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Great Unity Party (BBP) for posing a danger to the country’s constitutional order, DW said.
Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution flagged the Federation of Democratic Nationalist Turkish Associations in Germany, the largest umbrella organisation of the MHP in the country with 7,000 members, for violating the principle of equality in the German constitution because it advocates the supremacy of Turkishness, DW said.
The Federation for the European Order of the Realm, the BBP’s organisation in Germany, has also been monitored for years due to its nationalist ideology, which advocates a new world order based on a Turkish-Islamic synthesis, to be established under the leadership of Turks.
“The People’s Alliance is a combination of political Islam and ultra-nationalists. But the main issue here is not only ideological partnership; the issue is who will have access to power and resources in the future,” said Thomas Schmidinger, a political scientist from the University of Vienna.
In an effort to boost its ailing voters’ support ahead of 14 May elections, the AKP also forged an alliance with the Kurdish Islamist party Hüda-Par, which was founded on the ashes of the Kurdish Hizbullah, unrelated to Lebanese Hezbollah.
The extremist Sunni group which emerged in southeast Turkey in 1985, just one year after the start of an insurgence led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is known to many in Turkey for the bloodshed and horror it caused in the country’s Kurdish-majority region during the 1990s. The group disappeared from the public eye after the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was captured by Turkey in 1999 and reemerged almost a decade later as a civil society group that became the foundation of Hüda-Par in 2012.
Hüda-Par is defined as a party closely linked to the Hizbullah in Turkey, DW said, citing intelligence reports from North Rhine-Westphalia, which is home to a significant population from Turkey.
The Islamist New Welfare Party (YRP) also joined the People’s Alliance on Friday. The Party is linked to the Erbakan Foundation in Germany, which follows the political ideology of late Turkish politician Necmettin Erbakan, the founding leader of the National Vision movement that laid the roots of the AKP.
Turkey’s 2018 elections caused tensions between Ankara and Berlin, when Germany banned rallies of Turkish politicians on its soil. The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the time described the decision as “Nazi tactics”.
Home to 3.5 million Turkish nationals, Germany inevitably becomes a campaigning hotspot for Turkey’s political parties in every election.
