France on Saturday said it was recalling its envoy to Turkey for consultations after comments by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggesting French President Emmanuel Macron needed a mental health checkup that Paris condemned as unacceptable.
France and its NATO ally are at loggerheads over a range of issues including maritime rights in the eastern Mediterranean, Libya, Syria, and the escalating conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh.
However, Ankara has been particularly incensed by a campaign championed by Macron to protect France’s secular values against radical Islam, a debate given new impetus by the murder this month of a teacher who showed his class a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.
Photo: AP
“What can one say about a head of state who treats millions of members from different faith groups this way: First of all, have mental checks,” Erdogan said in a televised address in the central Anatolian city of Kayseri.
“What’s the problem of the individual called Macron with Islam and with the Muslims?” Erdogan asked.
“Macron needs mental treatment,” Erdogan said, adding that he did not expect the French leader to win a new mandate in 2022 elections.
In a highly unusual move, a French presidential official said that the French ambassador to Turkey was being recalled from Ankara for consultations and would meet Macron to discuss the situation in the wake of Erdogan’s outburst.
“President Erdogan’s comments are unacceptable. Excess and rudeness are not a method. We demand that Erdogan change the course of his policy, because it is dangerous in every respect,” the official told reporters.
The Elysee official, who asked not to be named, also said that France had noted “the absence of messages of condolence and support” from the Turkish president after the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris.
The official also expressed concern over calls by Ankara for a boycott of French goods.
Macron this month described Islam as a religion “in crisis” worldwide and said the French government would present a bill in December to strengthen a 1905 law that officially separated church and state in France.
He announced stricter oversight of schooling and better control over foreign funding of mosques.
However, the debate over the role of Islam in France has hit a new intensity after the beheading of Paty, which prosecutors have said was carried out by an 18-year-old Chechen who had contact with an extremist in Syria.
Meanwhile, calls to boycott French goods are growing in the Arab world and beyond, after Macron vowed not to “give up cartoons” depicting the Prophet Mohammed.
On Saturday, the Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it condemned the “continued publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed under the pretext of freedom of expression,” and any “discriminatory and misleading attempts that seek to link Islam with terrorism.”
It did not directly criticize Macron, although the French president had on Wednesday also contended that Paty was “killed because Islamists want our future.”
However, Jordan’s opposition Islamic Action Front party called on the French president to apologize for his comments and urged citizens in the kingdom to boycott French goods.
Such boycotts are already under way in Kuwait and Qatar.
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