Reporting on the latest phase of the attack on Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Deutsche Welle’s English-language service has circulated the precise technical and legalistic arguments put forward by the country’s government, while its Turkish-language service (@dw_turkce) has been deploying a vastly different editorial strategy for the domestic audience’s consumption.

On social media platforms, DW Turkce, the Turkish unit of the German government-funded multi-media institution, has heavily amplified narratives that paint the court-re-instated CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu as a “puppet” of the Erdogan regime, while selectively boosting factions of ousted chair Ozgur Ozel.

German government’s Turkish language-only support for opposition

In one notable instance, the Turkish service framed a routine, informal oral response from an unnamed German government spokesperson as a heavy-handed, official state declaration on Turkish internal affairs, a move that could be described as an open narrative manipulation.

In a separate story, the outlet went with the headline “German press: Erdogan has placed a puppet at the head of the CHP,” suggesting that not only Germany’s government but also its “press” are supporting Turkey’s opposition against the Erdogan administration.

Success of Berlin establishment’s policy choices

The editorial dissonance reignites a longstanding issue as regards Berlin’s fundamental approach to autocratic regimes on its eastern periphery.

Rather than a mere failure of editorial oversight, this bifurcated messaging reflects a core tenet of Germany’s foreign policy, namely maintaining a public veneer of democratic solidarity while acting to accommodate strongmen in the neighbourhood.

The success of the policy choices of the German establishment in the post-Bismarck era, meanwhile, remains questionable. Two world wars and the ongoing Ukraine War are not isolated cases. The list can be extended from Berlin to Damascus through illegal immigration routes.

Blueprint perfected by Schroder and Merkel

Historically, Berlin’s strategic architecture has prioritised commercial opportunities and transactional pragmatism over democratic principles. The blueprint was perfected during the chancellorships of Gerhard Schroder and Angela Merkel, whose administrations served as the primary financiers in the construction of Vladimir Putin’s regime via profits made on gas pipelines.

Driven by the corporate imperatives of cheap industrial inputs, Berlin ignored decades of warnings, underwriting the Kremlin via multi-billion-dollar natural gas invoices and the Nord Stream pipeline projects.

Operational ‘logic’

In one of many other examples in the region, a similar operational ‘logic’ governs Berlin’s relationship with Ankara. Despite years of a theatrical diplomatic spat in which Erdogan has routinely insulted Germany and the German people before the camera, all German governments have remained Erdogan’s ally in a bipartisan manner.

Germany’s entrenched state policy remains wedded to a status quo that values autocratic stability over democratic volatility. It is a great comfort for the Berlin crew to deal with a single man rather than millions of people in the form of a parliament or through other political bodies.

In the eyes of the lazyheads in the German government, a transactionalist strongman in Ankara will always outweigh the chaos that would stem from dealing with 86mn people, each with a say in the country’s immigration policies – policies that are tantamount to the kidnapping of millions of migrants in Turkey, with the country’s Western borders slammed shut and its Eastern borders kept open to passage.