German MP says banned from Turkey vote observer mission

A German lawmaker said Thursday Turkey had denied him entry as an international observer of key weekend elections while the foreign ministry in Berlin urged Ankara to lift the ban.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) go into crucial parliamentary and presidential elections on Sunday which could lead to radical changes in how the country is run.

German MP Andrej Hunko of the far-left Die Linke Party said he was scheduled to help monitor the elections for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), as he had in years past.

But he said he was told on Thursday by Turkey’s OSCE representative that he could not go, forcing him to get off a Turkey-bound flight from Vienna at the last moment.

Germany’s foreign ministry said it and the OSCE were “in contact with Turkey and urging a lift of the entry ban”, stressing that the monitoring mission was in the service of “strengthening democracy and the rule of law”.

Hunko labelled the entry ban an “unprecedented affront to international election monitoring” and blamed what he called the “growing nervousness” of Erdogan’s camp.

Erdogan’s AKP, running together with its junior partner the Nationalist Movement Party in the so-called People’s Alliance, is expected to win the most seats, but some analysts believe it will fail to win a parliamentary majority.

After the polls, Turkey’s parliamentary system will transform into an executive presidency following constitutional changes approved by a referendum in April 2017.