Almost half the members of the Turkish diaspora with the right to vote in Turkey, 1.4 millionthey live in Germany.

In yesterday’s elections, approx 730,000 of them, noting new participation record. As in 2018, so also yesterday, they gave to Tayyip Erdogan the 65%.

The numbers are such that, in the event of an inconclusive battle at second round of the presidential elections on May 28citizens of Turkish origin in Germany could even judge the outcome of the match.

Why Erdogan?

In the last two decades, Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP worked systematically to organize expatriates and the Turkish leadership has always attached special importance to the Turkish minority in Germany.

On an emotional level, the current president has managed to give expatriate Turks an unprecedented self confidence and pride for their country.

Turkey was developing economically and its infrastructure now resembled that of the country they came to as immigrants. Its foreign policy, the problems in human rights and rule of law issues, obviously do not equally concern the daily life of the inhabitants of Germany. In addition, Tayyip Erdoğan managed to give the diaspora in the previous years sense of “motherland”an identity they felt they lacked, judging by the frequent complaints that Germany treats them as second-class citizens.

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“Germany’s political class has never given the Turks in Germany a sense of belonging to German society,” sociologist Zabina Meyer of the University of Bamberg told Deutsche Welle. Indeed, there are Turks living in Germany who, although they came to the country decades ago, have not yet right to vote in their place of residence, but they have in Turkey – and this is valuable to them. Particularly important for immigrants is the legislation that now allows them to buy back their military service.

Of course, the interesting thing is that the Turkish minority, when they vote in the German elections, mainly choose the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens, parties which have traditionally had greater penetration in the working class.

On the other hand, Mr Kemal Kilicdaroglu it has no corresponding infrastructure abroad, and now heads a coalition of smaller parties with no ideological coherence. It is therefore even more difficult to appeal to expatriates with a unified voice, and since the stakes in the election have become “yes or no to Tayyip Erdoğan”, the voting behavior of the Turkish-born residents of Germany was rather to be expected.