German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will pay a three-day visit to Turkey next week during which he will meet with İstanbul’s popular mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, along with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to a press statement from his office on Tuesday.
Steinmeier is scheduled to be in Turkey April 22-24 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Germany and Turkey.
His official visit to Turkey will also be the first by a German president in 10 years.
Steinmeier will visit İstanbul, the southeastern province of Gaziantep and the capital city of Ankara during his time in the country.
In İstanbul he will have a meeting with İmamoğlu, from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), who was re-elected mayor in the local elections held on March 31.
İmamoğlu, seen as Erdoğan’s strongest political rival, received 51.1 percent of the vote in İstanbul while Murat Kurum, from Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), was able to garner only 39.5 percent. Kurum’s defeat dashed Erdoğan’s hopes of winning back the administration of Turkey’s economic powerhouse from the opposition.
Steinmeier will visit İstanbul’s Sirkeci train station from where thousands of Turkish guest workers set off for Germany starting in the 1960s.
He will also meet with people with experience in Turkish-German migration, representatives of German companies in the country and representatives from civil society organizations.
A cultural evening and reception will be held at the Tarabya Cultural Academy, a facility owned by the German government in İstanbul, to honor the 100th anniversary of German-Turkish friendship and the contributions of people of Turkish origin in business and science, art and literature, sports and cuisine.
On the second day of his visit on April 23, when Turkey marks Children’s Day, Steinmeier will visit a shelter for Turkey’s earthquake victims and a school in Gaziantep, which was among the provinces struck by two powerful earthquakes last year.
The earthquakes on February 6,2023, which devastated 11 provinces in Turkey’s south and southeast, left more than 53,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands injured or displaced.
Germany was among the first countries that sent search and rescue teams to Turkey along with millions of euros in donations for the earthquake victims.
Steinmeier’s meeting with Erdoğan will take place in Ankara on the last day of his trip, where he will also tour Ankara University and the mausoleum of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.
“The Republic of Turkey is an important partner for Germany in the region, in NATO and in the G20,” said the press statement.
There were comments on social media that the sequence of Steinmeier’s meetings with İmamoğlu and Erdoğan show that İmamoğlu is seen as the new leader of Turkey who will succeed Erdoğan.
Erdoğan was elected president for another five-year term in the presidential election held in May. Turkey is scheduled to hold its next presidential election in 2028.
Steinmeier, whose position is mostly symbolic, was first elected president in March 2017 and then again in February 2022. His time in office will end in 2027. Despite previous invitations from Erdoğan to visit Turkey, Steinmeier until now has opted to wait.
German-Turkish relations were strained following a failed coup in Turkey in 2016 due to politically motivated trials. German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel from the German Die Welt newspaper was kept in pretrial detention from 2017 to 2018 over his reporting on the attempted coup and the repression that followed.
Yücel’s case plunged relations between Ankara and Berlin to new lows, coming along with the detention of other journalists and activists.
Ties between the two countries have always been uneasy, with Berlin casting a wary eye on Erdoğan’s clampdown on domestic dissent while recognizing that getting regional power Turkey on board was necessary for tackling thorny issues.
Steinmeier, who served as German foreign minister between 2005-2009 and 2013-2017 from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), paid many visits to Turkey as foreign minister.
Erdoğan met with Steinmeier and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in November during his first visit to Berlin since 2020.