Erdogan bans Volkswagen as automaker pulls out

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Thursday that he is banning Vokswagen from official government service.

The German automaker is in the process of pulling out of Turkey, after having planned a manufacturing plant there.

The presidential office is said to have instructed the ministries and authorities in a circular to retire VW cars as official cars.

VW initially planned to build a plant for the VW Passat and Skoda Superb models near the Turkish city of Manisa. The investment costs would have amounted to around €1 billion. The plant would have created over 4,000 jobs and the production capacity would have been at about 300,000 vehicles per year.

VW’s plans were controversial in Germany due to democratic deficits in Turkey. Turkey made the crucial point when it launched a military operation in Syria in October 2019. The move was heavily criticised internationally, even referred to as an “invasion”. Volkswagen then postponed the decision to invest in Turkey. In 2020, the project was finally overturned, with the corona pandemic cited as the decisive factor. For example, Volkswagen said that “from today’s perspective, it is not necessary to build up additional capacities”.

The Turkish Minister of Economic Affairs, Mustafa Varank, reacted indignantly. “We knew that some people politically didn’t want this investment in Turkey,” he said. “If a company is on the stock exchange, then it is a fraud against the investor if decisions are made due to political pressure”. Turkish government officials maintained that VW could be said to have deceived its shareholders.

In the past, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was personally involved in the negotiations about the construction of the VW plant. He was reportedly enraged by the carmaker’s decision to not invest in Turkey With the boycott of Volkswagen, the German group is losing a lucrative business. After all, the Turkish government has a fleet of over 115,000 vehicles, according to government sources.