Swedish venue owner cancels contract with Turkish ruling party for rally

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed retaliation, accusing them of “Nazism”.

Over the weekend, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and Family Minister Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya were barred by the Dutch authorities from addressing Turkish nationals on the constitutional change referendum.

In the port city of Rotterdam, security authorities, including riot police, used a water cannon to disperse about 1,000 people. Some protesters threw bottles and stones and several demonstrators were beaten by police with batons, a Reuters witness said. Mounted police officers charged the crowd.

Soon after Cavusoglu was blocked from landing in Netherlands, a furious Erdogan hit back at the Dutch officials by saying they were “timid and coward” and branded them as “Nazi remnants and fascists”.

Erdogan told a rally in Istanbul: “You can stop our foreign minister’s plane all you want, let’s see how your (diplomatic) planes will come to Turkey from now on”. He said, “I thought that Nazism was over in Germany, but it turns out that it is still going on”.

Germany was the first to take such measures against Turkish ministers visiting the country for political campaigning.

VVD, the party of Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, is attempting to fend off a challenge by Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam Party for Freedom by taking a tough line on immigration and integration.

But he said the idea of apologizing was “bizarre”. I’m going to de-escalate, but not by offering apologies.

“It should be noted that, in this respect, the Turkish government does not want to respect those rules”.

“Hey Holland! If you are sacrificing Turkish-Dutch relations for the sake of the elections on Wednesday, you will pay a price”, Erdogan said Sunday.

The foreign ministry has asked the Dutch ambassador in Ankara, who is now on leave, not to return “for a while”.

German Prime Minster Angela Merkel condemned the comments, calling them “sad” and “misplaced”. Austria and The Netherlands then followed to cancel similar rallies organized by the Turkish societies. “If this amendment carries, then for a while, Turkey will have a system with very little, if any, checks and balances, as far as numerous experts can see”.

Two Turkish ministers were blocked from campaigning for the country’s upcoming referendum on Sunday.

“It is time that the European Union stops performing like a diplomatic paper tiger towards Ankara”.

The row has erupted just days before Dutch general elections, already marked by a polarising debate over immigration and integration. “The Dutch government does not have any protest against gatherings in our country to inform them about it”, he said on Facebook. The Dutch government has no objection to meetings in our country in order to inform them about that.

The French foreign ministry urged calm and said there had been no reason to prohibit a meeting in France between Çavuşoğlu and a local Turkish association.

There was also uncertainty about whether an event he was due to attend in Zurich, Switzerland, on Sunday would go ahead after one venue refused to hold it. Zurich’s security authorities had unsuccessfully lobbied the federal government in Bern to ban Cavusoglu’s appearance.