Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Photo: Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s official visit to Germany on Friday was shrouded in tension over his constant attacks upon the State of Israel along with renewed interest in the German press concerning the activities of Turkish lobby groups in the country.

There was little fanfare around Erdogan’s visit, which consisted of two private meetings with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, while a planned trip to a soccer friendly between Germany and Turkey was canceled.

“There was a fear that there’d be anti-Israel chants,” Aydin Yasar, a Turkey specialist at the German think tank SWP, told Reuters. “It’s unlikely Scholz would want to watch it with him. At other times it would have been a nice gesture.”

Despite the fact that both Scholz and Steinmeier have vocally backed Israel’s right to defend itself in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom, neither man elected to confront Erdogan over his support for Hamas. A terse statement from Steinmeier’s office posted on X/Twitter after his dinner with Erdogan noted that “due to the latest statements from Turkey on the Middle East conflict, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier made clear Germany’s position,” which “highlighted Israel’s right to exist as well as its right to defend itself.” Meanwhile, Scholz on Tuesday described Erdogan’s characterization of Hamas as a liberation movement and not a terrorist organization as “absurd,” insisting that Israel is “a country that is bound to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.”

Separately, a spokesperson for Scholz declined to speculate, when asked by the Reuters news agency, on how Germany would proceed with Erdogan‘s request to buy 40 Eurofighter Typhoon warplanes — a move that would need Scholz’s support since Germany is part of the consortium that builds them. The broader discussions taking place during Erdogan’s first visit to Germany since 2020 aim to forge a degree of consensus on trade, migration, and defense issues, despite the gap between the two countries on both the war in Gaza and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Erdogan’s presence has underscored the influence of pro-government lobby groups among the three million German residents with roots in Turkey.

The Union of International Democrats (UID) — a Cologne-based organization — has been closely scrutinized by the German authorities since the summer, amid wider concerns that the MTK, Turkey’s security service, has stepped up its propaganda activities among Germany’s Turkish communities.

Last week, the UID quietly canceled a forthcoming public meeting in December that would have featured Abdurrahman Uzun, a Turkish YouTube influencer known for his antisemitic rants. “Do you know why I am an enemy of Israel and the Jews, do you know that? God made me an enemy of the Jews, this Israel and these Zionists in the Quran,” Uzun said in a video posted five days after the Hamas onslaught. “God declared me an enemy of this tribe, this Zionist tribe, in the Quran.”

In an interview with the broadcaster ARD this week, Tugrul Selmanoglu, a senior UID official, suggested that Erdogan could lead a “union” of Islamic countries in a war against Israel.

Observing that “there are no leaders, there is no caliph, there is no diplomatic institution that can lead that,” Selmanoglu added, “0f course that would be one [person] that comes to everyone’s mind.” Asked if he meant Erdogan, he replied, “if you say so” with a laugh.

“The UID is ultimately also a propaganda center that is clearly committed to mobilizing AKP voters and represents Erdogan’s political interests here in Germany,” Burak Copur, a Germany-based political analyst, told the tagesschau news outlet. He observed as well that the group was “being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution because its goals are not compatible with Germany’s free, democratic basic order.”

More than 2,000 incidents targeting Jews in Germany have been recorded since Oct. 7, according to data from the Federal Criminal Police Office released last week. The explosion of violence and harassment has highlighted the prevalence of antisemitic attitudes among Germany’s Muslim communities, who have staged angry demonstrations in support of Hamas in several cities during the last month.