The referendum in Turkey on the expansion of president Erdogan's power resulted in a narrow win about 51.4% for Erdogan (Yes votes). Not knowing much about Turkish domestic politics, the blogster found the analysis of the election result in Germany rather enlightening.
Turks, including Kurds, make up the largest minority in Germany, with about 25% of foreign citizens living in the country, and just under 1.5 million were eligible to cast ballots in the referendum, with around 50% of them actually doing so.
All in all, about 3 million people of Turkish descent lived in Germany in2012, of which about half had German citizenship. Around 530 000 have dual German and Turkish citizenship.
The most comprehensive list of outcomes is on abc.net, here.
In the referendum, about 63% of ballots cast by Turkish voters in Germany were Yes votes.
In Austria, the Yes vote garnered 73%.
In Switzerland, Yes received just 38.6%.
In the U.S., only about 17% voted Yes.
In the United Arab Emirates, only 13% were Yes votes.
Belgium came out with 77% Yes.
Germany has seen controversies about its Turkish minority, about attempts to "integrate" it, about multiculturalism on an off for decades. It comes as no surprise that the same arguments come up after the referendum.
Conservatives tend to regard what is generally seen as a pro authoritarian Yes vote as a slap in the face of the host nation. Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) publisher Kohler called the past German relationship with its largest minority the "lie of a lifetime".
He simply claims that German migration policies have been "too tolerant" and that Germany "for decades, had not demanded migrants integrate as best as possible". For good measure, he adds that "any effort is futile if the immigrants don't want to integrate".
Turks have often been accused in Germany that they do not want to "integrate". Even leading Greens politician Oezdemir, himself the child of Turkish immigrants, called on Turkish residents in Germany to do more to integrate into society.
Dual citizenship, fought over for a long time before it became law, is under attack yet again.
While Turkish immigrants have been more visible as a minority in Germany, they have certainly not benefited from Germany being "too tolerant". The German conservatives, who have been in government for some 50 out of 70 years of post war history, have strenuously denied Germany was an immigration country for most of those years, and event today some still cling to the fantasy.
German politics was not asking people to "integrate as best as they could" because integration was not wanted! Workers came as "guest workers" and were supposed to go back home, whether that was Italy or Turkey, or Span, or Greece.
There were no (free) language classes, there was no offer by the fat cat German public broadcasters in Turkish, there was no "sausage meets potsticker" festival like one recently held in a community that has seen a large influx of Chinese.
There were, however, a series of murders by German neo-Nazis that targeted Turks - with German police investigating them as "intra Turkish" - and arson attacks like one that killed five in 1993.
Not one of the German articles analyzing the referendum has looked even superficially at possible reasons for the widely different outcomes in some countries.
If they had, they might have pointed out one obvious point: the industrial workforces of Belgium, Germany, Holland, and France voted Yes, the more educated workers in, for example, the UAE voted overwhelmingly No.
The overwhelming majority of Turkish citizens (aside from Kurds often fleeing persecution) that came into northern Europe from the 1960s on were simple laborers from disadvantaged, rural regions of Turkey - the same regions where the referendum won with a Yes majority.
As exiled journalist Duendar pointed out in the more liberal Die Zeit, the referendum ended with 25 million Turks voting for Erdogan and 24 million against despite the crackdown on the opposition in Turkey. Despite mass firings, jailing of journalists, shuttering of media outlets.
Yet, once again, German politicians from the right to the medium left see alienating those Turks who voted Yes as the reasonable thing to do.
By the way, we have yet to see statistics about the Americans who live in Germany and voted Trump. Also, there should be calls for them to integrate, right?
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