First he congratulated him via twitter on his election victory and in less than a day followed Chancellor Olaf Solz’s official challenge to the re-elected President of Turkey Tayyip Erdogan for bilateral contacts in the German capital with now renewed interest and the hope for a new, ” fresh” beginning in the German-Turkish issues.

The German chancellor, according to a statement from the chancellery, had a telephone conversation with the Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan on Monday afternoon, during which the proposal for Berlin came up.

As NATO partners, Germany and Turkey want to “examine cooperation between their governments with renewed impetus” by agreeing on new “priorities,” chancellery spokesman Steffen Hempstreit said in the statement. In fact, these priorities include cooperation for “achieving positive developments in the Eastern Mediterranean region”, which directly concerns Greece and Cyprus, relations with NATO and the Euro-Turkish agenda.

Erdogan’s visits to Germany

It is worth noting that the last time Tayyip Erdoğan had visited Berlin was in 2018, under Angela Merkel, in an episodic trip at the time. The grandiose appearance of the Turkish president, among others, in a mosque in Cologne in front of thousands of his supporters had caused a stir.

In total, Tayyip Erdogan has visited Germany, either as prime minister or as president of the country, 10 times. In addition to 2018, as president he also visited Germany three more times on other occasions: in 2020 for the International Conference on Libya, in 2017 for the G-20 Summit in Hamburg and in 2015 in Karlsruhe, as part of an election campaign. As prime minister he had also made a total of 6 other visits to Germany, either official or as part of other events.

Turkish communities react to Ezdemir’s statements

At the same time, the Turkish-born Minister of Georgia Cem Ezdemir from the Greens, after their first statements about the failure of “pluralist democracy” on the occasion of the frenzied celebrations of Erdogan’s voters in many German cities on Sunday night, returns with new statements. Ezdemir is now warning of a wave of young, nationalist imams about to be sent to Germany, who could thus influence young Turks in Germany.

However, the reaction of the president of the Turkish Communities of Germany, Gyokey Sofuoglu, who, speaking on the German radio station DLF, rejected criticism of the electoral behavior of his countrymen in Germany, stressing that it would be good for German politicians to stay away from Turkey’s electoral issues, was also immediate. .