German, Turkish Presidents meet in Ankara

At the end of his three-day visit to Turkey, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

The visit began on Wednesday in Ankara with Erdoğan welcoming his guest from Germany with military honours, including gun salutes. The two then retired for lengthy talks.

The Gaza war, on which Germany and Turkey have very different positions, is likely to play a central role.

The German side is irritated by Erdoğan's stance on the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas, which is responsible for the massacre in Israel on October 7, but which Erdoğan describes as a liberation movement.

Erdoğan accuses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of a "massacre" in the Gaza Strip and sometimes compares him to Adolf Hitler. Erdoğan maintains close contacts with Hamas. At the weekend, he met its foreign policy chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Steinmeier is also likely to address the human rights situation. Important representatives of civil society, such as the cultural patron and philanthropist Osman Kavala, are still in prison.

The organization Reporters Without Borders appealed to Steinmeier before the start of his trip to press for the release of imprisoned media representatives.

Before his return flight, Steinmeier also plans to meet the leader of the opposition party Republican People's Party (CHP), Özgür Özel.

In the local elections at the end of March, the CHP triumphed over Erdoğan's Islamic conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), which is now no longer the strongest party in the country for the first time in its history.

In the morning, Steinmeier first laid a wreath at the mausoleum of the founder of the modern republic of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk.