The Democratic Alliance for Diversity and Awakening (DAVA) went public in mid-January with the announcement that it wanted to take part in the European elections on June 9. The candidates that DAVA has presented so far include two men who were previously involved in German Islamic associations. Dava says it wants to field people from different backgrounds as candidates for the European elections. The chairman of the new association, Teyfik Özcan, rejected allegations that DAVA was the extended arm of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-conservative Turkish ruling party AKP.
In most of the comments provoked by the announcement that it would run in the next European elections, DAVA was dismissed as Erdogan’s puppet. Its chairman Öczan complained bitterly about this, but in his articles for the offshoot of the Turkish state broadcaster TRT he hardly missed an opportunity to express his enthusiasm for the Turkish president. The connections of the DAVA top candidates to the Turkish ruling party are also difficult to deny.
One of them is Fatih Zingal. He was a member of the AKP lobby organization UID and is known from talk shows as an ardent Erdogan defender. The other two top candidates served as officials of the Turkish mosque association Ditib and the nationalist-Islamist Milli Görüs movement, which was founded by Erdogan’s foster father Necmettin Erbakan. Ditib, Milli Görüs and AKP form a close ideological network in Turkey today. The fact that the Middle East conflict has recently become an increasingly hot topic here has not only to do with the anti-Semitic tradition of the Milli Görüs, but also with Erdogan’s efforts to position himself as an integrating figure in political Islam.
If DAVA attracts more attention than its failed predecessors in Germany, BIG and ADD, then it is because it has a powerful apparatus at its disposal with the around 1,200 mosques of Ditib and Milli Görüs, which, experts suspect, it will fall back on can. The estimate of the potential voter potential at around five million people is high. However, the party will undoubtedly benefit from the liberalization of citizenship law, which will allow more Turks and Muslims to enjoy German voting rights.
DAVA wants to become the voice of all people with a history of immigration and especially Muslims in Germany. How big is DAVA’s voter potential? Party representatives speak of five million Muslims in Germany, some even as many as seven million. Not all of them are eligible to vote, also because many of them do not have a German passport. However, the representatives are betting that the number of Muslims eligible to vote will continue to increase due to immigration and the liberalization of citizenship law decided by the German coalition. The decisive factor for electoral success will likely be whether DAVA succeeds in winning over other Muslims beyond the Turkish-born voter milieu. According to election researchers, the Middle East conflict could become a success factor. At least externally, the German party landscape is committed to Israel, which alienates many Muslims, Turks and Arabs, even if Öczan, who advocates a two-state solution, wants nothing to do with it.
The upcoming founding of a party is particularly bitter for the Social Democrats, who have long been considered the core party of Turks and Muslims. The fact that the voting behavior of people of Turkish origin is now as flexible as that of all other Germans does not necessarily have to work in favor of a new party. Taking the 500,000 votes that Erdogan achieved in the Turkish presidential election in Germany as a yardstick, then you will not underestimate the pulling power of Turkish nationalism.
DAVA’s program reads as a mixture of social democratic welfare policy and conservative social policy, technologically forward-looking, nature-friendly and pro-EU. The potential for provocation lies in social and religious politics. Overall, it is about a change of direction in the relationship between family and individual. Individual freedoms are not negated, but are subordinated to the family. In religious policy there is a demand for the recognition of Islamic associations as religious communities.
In the case of Ditib, this would also offer the opportunity to break away from Turkish influence and overcome the specific challenges facing Muslims in Germany, says Özcan. If you know the ultra-conservative views of many association representatives, you will see it as a setback for moderate Islam in Germany. It is difficult to share Öczan’s confidence that Milli Görüs, which has been assigned to Islamism by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, will embark on a reform process. A recent study by the Documentation Center for Political Islam shows an opposite trend.
The demand in the party program to correct negative depictions of Islam in school textbooks or to tighten laws against Islamophobia is dangerous because no clear demarcation from Islamism is made. If you take the ideological background of the party representatives, then it can be assumed that this is intended to put a legal stop to any criticism of Islamism. How far the unity of the Abrahamic religions invoked by Öczan will last in the event of a conflict remains to be seen.
One can argue about whether the party program should be read as a reflection of legalistic Islamism, which wants to peacefully transform society gradually into a theocracy, conceals its true goals and is pragmatically satisfied with what can be achieved, or as a new party-political profile. In any case, the largely moderate tones do not really fit with the political background of the DAVA representatives and their statements about Israel, for example. The European election candidate Mustafa Yoldas headed an organization that the German Ministry of the Interior banned for supporting Hamas.
The German government cannot complain about the new competition. This is the consistent continuation of its minority policy with a Turkish-Islamic touch. The demand in the party program that, if possible, foster children should not be given to parents from other cultures reveals an ethnopluralistic touch.
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