In 2009, Özil forfeited Turkish membership, after he chose to play for the German football national team. He was framed as an “ethnic traitor”, a “Turk who had defected”, lost touch with his “roots”. On the other hand, Mesut Özil was celebrated as the poster boy for immigrant integration politics in Germany, where he was, for instance, awarded a national immigrant integration prize in 2011 and seen as one of the most influential role models to promote second- and third-generation German-Turks’ identification with Germany.[...]
Public photos of Özil and Erdogan have appeared regularly since 2011, and he always prayed before matches, sharing a post of his pilgrimage to Mecca before the 2016 European Championship. Özil was neither fully reconciled to his Turkish identity at that stage nor banned from German national identity, though the AfD party had unsuccessfully tried to create a scandal around events related to Özil before 2018. Why then was there no escalation before 2018?[...]
Ever since the 2017 election campaign, traditional parties have pursued disenchanted national-conservative voters by raising a critical voice on the ”Turkish issue”. Özil could not escape the recurring nationalist German-Turkish blame-games expounded by the already established populist radical-right in Turkey and its consolidating counterpart in Germany. Failed political messaging by traditional parties, and unmet promises, facilitated the mainstreaming of radical-right narratives which defended secessionist expressions of nativist nationhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment