A bomb threat forced the evacuation of the town hall in the south-western German town of Gaggenau on Friday.
A day after local officials cancelled a rally in support of a referendum aimed at boosting the powers of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The decision by Gaggenau officials to call off the rally, which Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag was due to address, has sharply escalated diplomatic tensions between Ankara and Berlin.
A member of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), Bozdag’s speech in Gaggenau on Thursday evening was to be one of a series of events planned across Germany aimed at mobilising Turkish voters in the country behind next month’s referendum in Turkey.
Turkish Economics Minister Nihat Zeybekci was due to speak at a rally in the western German city of Leverkusen on Sunday after Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim addressed Turkish voters at a campaign rally in the Rhineland town of Oberhausen last week.
Of the about 3 million Turks living in Germany roughly half are eligible to vote in the referendum set for April 16.
While police and sniffer dogs searched the Gaggenau town hall, the streets around the building were closed off.
Gaggenau’s mayor, Michael Pfeiffer, said the decision to cancel Thursday’s rally had been due to security concerns and had not been political.
“The whole thing of course takes on an enormous dimension for a small town,’’ Pfeiffer said, adding that the bomb threat was conveyed to the town hall via a mobile phone.
But the move by the Gaggenau authorities to call off the rally comes against the backdrop of renewed strains in relations between Ankara and Berlin over the arrest in Turkey of the German-Turkish journalist Denzil Yucel.
He has been accused by the Turkish authorities of spreading propaganda from the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as well as the movement of exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan believes was the mastermind behind last July’s failed military coup.
Yucel’s arrest also came in the wake of growing tensions between Ankara and Berlin over the last 12 months.
Relations reached near boiling point after the German Parliament’s decision last June to declare that the killing a century ago of as many as 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire was genocide.
The two nations have also clashed over freedom of the press and artistic expression after Erdogan was enraged by being lampooned in a crude satire by a German comedian.
But Berlin and the European Union also need to ensure that Turkey remains part of a deal spearheaded in 2016 by German Chancellor Merkel, which calls for Ankara to take back refugees arriving in Greece from Turkey in return for the EU providing financial support to shelter the refugees.
Bozdag lashed out Gaggenau’s decision to ban the rally describing it as “a scandalous process which in the truest sense of the word is fascist.’’
German political leaders also hit back at Ankara.
“If you want to undertake an election campaign for Turkish affairs, please do so in Turkey,’’ said Thomas Strobl, who is one of Merkel’s closest political allies and interior minister in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, where Gaggenau is located.
Baden-Wuerttemberg Premier Winfried Kretschmann also called on Berlin to step up its involvement in the deepening political controversy surrounding the Turkish ministers electioneering in Germany.
“I think the federal government needs to be active and has to talk to the relevant authorities in Turkey,’’ Kretschmann told German public radio on Thursday.
