Turkey and Germany bicker as Erdogan travels to meet Putin

The diplomatic war of words between Ankara and the EU has escalated further with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accusing Berlin of “feeding terrorists” and Germany’s deputy leader questioning whether Turkey will ever join the EU.

Amid the fallout from last month’s failed coup, meanwhile, politicians in Germany and Austria have questioned the motivations behind the coup attempt – drawing parallels to the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1933.

Mr Erdogan, meanwhile, has condemned Germany’s refusal to allow him address by video link supporters gathered last week in Cologne. “Where is the democracy?” he asked a rally of more than one million people in Istanbul on Sunday.

Cologne authorities banned the video transmission, backed by Germany’s highest court, fearing it would agitate the crowd. But Mr Erdogan noted before the Istanbul crowd how a commander of the Kurdish militant group PKK had previously been allowed address a Cologne demonstration.

“They’re only feeding the terrorists. Like a boomerang, it will come back to them,” he said in Istanbul.

In his address the Turkish leader stepped up his attack on western leaders for their response to the failed coup, saying they had “not shown us that they are against the coup . . . their silence is inexcusable”.

A spokeswoman for Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed these claims on Monday, saying Berlin had “positioned itself very early and very clearly against this military putsch, and made in no uncertain terms clear that we did not support those behind the putsch”.

Membership doubts

After Mr Erdogan’s vow to support a reinstatement of the death penalty, leading German officials have expressed in public their doubts that Turkey will ever join the EU.

On Sunday evening, deputy chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), told broadcaster ARD he did not expect Turkey to become an EU member in the next 10 or even 20 years, but that “every avenue of communication” with Turkey should be explored.

Last week, Austrian chancellor Christian Kern said that Turkey’s EU accession efforts were a “diplomatic fiction”.

In response to that Austrian remark, an Erdogan adviser, Burhan Kuzu, posted on Twitter: “F**k off foreigner. The EU’s doomed anyway and Nato is nothing without Turkey”.

After his remark was retweeted hundreds of times, Mr Kuzu said he had meant to say “Oh come on, foreigner”.

On Tuesday, Mr Erdogan heads to St Petersburg for talks with Russian president Vladimir Putin, a visit intended to restore diplomatic relations strained after a Russian military plane was shot down last year over Turkey.

Ahead of the visit, Mr Erdogan used an interview with Le Monde to threaten again to pull the plug on a refugee swap deal agreed with the EU last March unless Turkish citizens are granted visa-free access to the EU by October.

“The European Union is not behaving in a sincere manner with Turkey,” he said.

Historical parallels

As tensions refuse to abate, politicians in Germany and Austria have drawn historical parallels between the failed coup and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.

“We are dealing with a state putsch from above, like in 1933 after the Reichstag fire,” said Christian Lindner, leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a former Merkel coalition partner. Mr Erdogan, the FDP leader told Bild’s Sunday edition, was “building up an authoritarian regime tailored around his person”.

On Saturday, Christian Strache, leader of Austria’s far-right populist Freedom Party (FPÖ), asked whether the failed coup was a “guided putsch aimed in the end at making a presidential dictatorship by Erdogan possible”.

Mr Strache added: “We’ve experienced such mechanisms elsewhere before, such as with the Reichstag fire, after which total power was seized.”