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Thomas Haldenwang, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said that forthcoming 2023 elections in Turkey could have repercussions in Germany, Deutsche Welle reported on Sunday.
“The controversies in Turkey’s domestic politics are spilling over to here,” DW quoted Haldenwang as saying in an interview with the German news agency dpa.
Haldenwang added that Turkish nationalists and far right extremists supporting the Turkish government as well as members of the democratic opposition and the left-wing and pro-Kurdish groups have all played a role in transferring domestic tensions to Germany.
The domestic intelligence chief also said that journalists living in Germany who opposed the Turkish government had been followed and repressed.
Turkey’s 2018 elections also 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”.
Austria and the Netherlands imposed similar bans in the run-up to the 2018 elections.
Home to 3.5 million Turkish nationals, Germany inevitably becomes a campaigning hotspot for Turkey’s political parties in every election.
