UEFA sanctioned Turkish footballer Demiral’s far-right gesture with two games

Turkey defender Merih Demiral will not play in Saturday’s quarter-final against the Netherlands after UEFA handed him a two-match ban for “defaming football” in a gesture by Turkish far-right group the Grey Wolves.

UEFA believes that the footballer, who celebrated one of his two goals against Austria in the last 16 by holding the symbol of the paramilitary organization with both hands, violated the general principles of conduct by “using sporting events for unsportsmanlike demonstrations and to discredit football.”

After the match, 26-year-old Demiral justified his gesture, saying the way he celebrated his goal “had something to do with my Turkish identity,” before adding that his intention was to express the pride he feels in being a Turkish citizen in this country.

However, the Turkish centre’s gesture is in line with that of the far-right paramilitary group responsible for several massacres and massacres of leftist opponents in Turkey in the 1970s.

The group, which is still active today and which in countries such as Germany unites around 15,000 people from the Turkish diaspora, is close to the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), led by Devlet Bahceli and a key political ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In fact, Erdogan himself came to the athlete’s defense this afternoon, calling the reaction “excessive” and comparing the far-right gesture to other “national symbols” such as Germany’s eagle or France’s rooster.

The Turkish Football Federation appealed the sanction to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, arguing that the gesture was a cultural and historical symbol for Turks and that it could not be identified with just one group that uses it.

Nancy Faser, the German government’s interior minister, called the gesture “unacceptable” on Wednesday: “Symbols of the Turkish far right have no place in our stadiums. Using the European Cup as a platform for racism is completely unacceptable,” he said in a message posted on his X social media account, in which he commented on an article about Demiral in the weekly Der Spiegel.

“Our security agencies are closely monitoring Turkish far-right extremists in Germany. The ‘grey wolves’ are under surveillance by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution,” the German minister recalled in her message, adding that she expects a reaction from UEFA and that sanctions will be considered.

In recent years, numerous political forces in Germany have called on both the current and previous governments led by Angela Merkel to ban the organization. This measure was already taken by other countries, such as France, in 2000.

The far-right Grey Wolves organization bases its ideology on Turkish nationalism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and lists among its goals the creation of an empire “from the Balkans to China,” which they see as the successor to the Ottoman Empire.