The
spat between Turkey and the Netherlands is all about winning votes
By Ishaan Tharoor
March 13 at 1:00 AM
The
escalating crisis between Turkey and the Netherlands is a startling
example of how this year's crucial election campaigns can flare into
international incidents.
The Dutch go to the
polls this Wednesday for a parliamentary election seen as a
bellwether for Europe's political future, and all eyes are focused on
far-right, Euroskeptic, anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders. Meanwhile,
Turkey will hold a referendum next month on constitutional revisions
that would scrap the country's parliamentary system in favor of an
executive presidency under the powerful President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. In their electoral bids, Erdogan and Wilders have found
useful bogeymen in one another's nations.
"The
explanation for the Dutch-Turkish 'crisis' this weekend is pretty
straightforward," wrote Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde in a
message to Today's WorldView. "Both countries are currently
engulfed in electoral campaigns that are dominated by authoritarian
nativism."
The drama started
after two Turkish ministers were blocked from attending rallies in
the Netherlands. The votes of the sizable Turkish diaspora in
northern Europe may be key for Erdogan's cause, and his loyalists
were scheduled to hit the campaign trail in various European cities.
Concerned about such rallies taking place so close to their own
election day, the Dutch government barred Turkish Foreign Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu from landing in the Netherlands on Saturday.
When Betul Sayan
Kaya, the Turkish minister for families, traveled by car from Germany
to the Dutch city of Rotterdam, she was stopped by police outside the
city's Turkish consulate and barred from entering the building as
crowds of Dutch Turks began to rally around the area. She was
eventually given a police escort to the German border and flew back
to Turkey in a private jet.
The scenes in
Rotterdam fanned anger in both countries. Wilders, who anchors his
politics in a rejection of Islam and Muslim immigration, mocked the
protesters as anti-Dutch. "The Netherlands can see that these
people are Turks, not Dutch. They have Dutch passports, but they
don’t belong here," he tweeted. He also jeered Kaya:
Turkish officials
condemned the Dutch government's actions as "fascism" and
argued that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, a center-right
politician who is seeking to head off the challenge posed by Wilders,
was pandering to bigotry.
Tensions between
Turkey and the European Union have been simmering for the past couple
of years, with the two sides clashing over the Syrian refugee crisis
and Europe's supposed coddling of Kurdish separatists. In his
polemics, Erdogan routinely nurtures a sense of grievance over
Western hypocrisy and meddling.
Turkish President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on March 12 that the Netherlands was acting
like a "banana republic" and should face sanctions for
barring Turkish ministers from speaking in Rotterdam, fueling a row
over Turkey's political campaigning abroad. (Reuters)
"The West has
thrown off its mask in the past days," Erdogan said at a Sunday
rally in Istanbul. "What we have seen is a clear manifestation
of Islamophobia. I have said that I had thought Nazism was over, but
that I was wrong. Nazism is alive in the West." Erdogan had also
hurled such accusations at Germany when its authorities decided to
block certain Turkish rallies.
Ibrahim Kalin,
Erdogan's senior spokesman, reacted directly to Wilders's tweets.
The spat may spiral
even further: Turkish officials have promised retribution and may
block the Dutch ambassador in Ankara, currently on leave, from
returning. "Our Dutch counterparts have been told that this
grave decision taken against Turkey and the Turkish community in the
Netherlands will bear serious consequences in the diplomatic,
political, economic and other fields of our relations," read an
emailed statement from Turkey's Foreign Ministry.
Some pro-Erdogan
protesters even gathered together and squeezed oranges — a
reference to the Dutch — in symbolic fury and drank the juice.
“We’ve ended up
in a bad movie," Rutte complained. "The Turks have ramped
this up themselves."
Ahead of the
elections, the Dutch prime minister has toed a tougher line on
immigration, arguing that some Dutch Muslims have to work harder to
integrate into Dutch society. He even published a full-page newspaper
ad that warned migrants to "be normal or be gone." Such
rhetoric has seen Rutte claw ahead of Wilders and his far-right Party
for Freedom in opinion polls, which had Wilders in the lead.
(Wilders's extremist politics and the fragmentation of the Dutch vote
mean he'll likely stay in the opposition even if his party wins first
place.)
Ironically, although
Turkish authorities comment angrily about the suppression of
peaceful, democratic Turkish assemblies, critics contend that
Erdogan's referendum is a method for entrenching his authoritarian
rule. After a failed coup attempt against Erdogan last summer, the
Turkish government embarked on a widespread purge of the country's
bureaucracy and civil society. The dismembering of Turkey's
parliamentary system is seen as another dangerous step in the
unraveling of democracy under Erdogan's watch.
Still, there's no
guarantee that Erdogan's "yes" camp will win — Turkish
opinion polls, such as they are, suggest a neck-and-neck contest,
with the country's embittered and oft-divided opposition rallying
against the president. So Erdogan, a moderate Islamist, is drawing
from his time-tested nationalist playbook to win votes. One Turkish
dissident tweeted a cartoon summing it all up:
The irony, of
course, is that Wilders can point to the same incidents over the
weekend and also hope for an electoral boost. The far-right
politician has long inveighed against Erdogan — whom he calls a
"dictator" — and the European leaders who supposedly
appease him. Last week, Wilders staged a brief demonstration outside
the Turkish embassy in The Hague, campaigning against the Turkish
foreign minister's visit. He stood in front of a banner that read:
"Stay Away! This is our country."
"When society
is prompted to hate Muslims with xenophobic arguments, eventually
they start to hate all 'others,' want more restrictions, more walls
and more protectionism," a Turkish columnist said in the Daily
Sabah, a staunchly pro-Erdogan newspaper. "And that will bring
the end of the union the Europeans spent decades building and
establishing."
That conclusion
happens to be music to the ears of Wilders and his far-right
supporters.
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