German President Steinmeier’s Trip to Turkey “The Kebab Spindle Is Already Frozen” Source: AFP/ODD ANDERSEN It is the first trip to Turkey by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a diplomatic tightrope walk. On the plane with him is Arif Keles, a Berlin kebab shop owner with his meat skewer. He is part of Steinmeier’s tactics.
Arif Keles has prepared everything for the trip with the President. “The kebab spindle is already frozen,” says Keles, who runs a grill snack bar at Berlin’s Yorckstraße S-Bahn station in the third generation. “The spindle is traveling in the presidential plane.” On Monday, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sets off on a visit to Turkey – his first since taking office. He takes the Berlin kebab shop owner as a guest of honor: Keles is expected to serve his kebab from Berlin at the state reception on Monday evening at the Bosporus. It is an unusual presidential visit: Steinmeier’s official contacts with the leadership around autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are reduced to a minimum. Instead, Steinmeier wants to honor the close ties between the populations of both countries, especially the life achievements of those Turks who have set out as labor migrants to Germany since the 1960s – like Arif Keles’ grandfather.
“I see it as a great recognition that I am allowed to go on the trip,” says Keles. His grandfather toiled in a foundry for years, then opened his own kebab snack bar in 1986 – “and now the President is taking me, the grandson, to the homeland of my ancestors.” In Istanbul, the first stop on his journey, Steinmeier will meet people with migration backgrounds and representatives of civil society on Monday – but not representatives of the Erdogan government. His first conversation partner in Istanbul is Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu – the most popular Turkish opposition politician, who some already see as the next president. On Tuesday, Steinmeier will visit earthquake survivors in Gaziantep on the Syrian border. A meeting with Erdogan will close the trip.
“It is a signal that this trip does not start in Ankara,” says the Federal Presidential Office. Steinmeier will only meet President Erdogan, with whom he has fought many conflicts, at the end of the trip on Wednesday in Ankara. It is likely that differences will become apparent again. Steinmeier counters this with a message: No matter how great the differences with Erdogan may be, Germans and Turks share a close friendship. Kebab as “a sort of German national dish” And nothing embodies the rootedness of Turkish culture in German everyday life as much as kebab. That’s why the President has invited the kebab shop owner from Kreuzberg, Arif Keles, to accompany him. “Kebab has now become a kind of German national dish,” as one of Steinmeier’s advisers puts it, pointing to an estimated annual turnover of the German kebab industry of seven billion euros – a migrant success story. Steinmeier wants to make a statement with the trip shortly before the 75th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany that the life stories and achievements of now four generations of Turkish immigrants are part of our Federal Republic, “They belong, so to speak, in the heart of Germany.”
This appreciative commitment does not, of course, capture the entire complexity of the relationship between Germany and Turkey: Almost three million Turkish-origin people now live in Germany. However, the relationships at the government level between the Federal Republic and Erdogan’s Turkey have been poor for years. Erdogan’s current support for the radical Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip is disturbing for the German government. German criticism of deficits in democracy and the rule of law in Turkey is a perennial issue, and Erdogan always reacts angrily to such criticism. Former Foreign Minister Steinmeier has repeatedly experienced the irritability of the Turkish president himself, having known Erdogan for 20 years. The fact that Steinmeier waited seven years after his election as Federal President before visiting Turkey for the first time as head of state speaks volumes.
