Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Thursday said he had no regrets about calling European leaders "Nazis" over their refusal to allow his ministers to hold rallies in their countries earlier this year.
"I do not regret it at all, because this behaviour is one that corresponds to the very definition of Nazism," Erdoğan said in an interview with French broadcaster France 24 ahead of his attendance at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, on Friday and Saturday.
Earlier this year, Germany and the Netherlands blocked several events by Turkish officials who wanted to address expatriate voters ahead of a constitutional referendum to increase the powers of the presidency.
Erdoğan said that Germany's latest refusal to allow him to address Turkish citizens during his visit for the G20 was "quite unfortunate... when it comes to international politics, when it comes to individual liberties or the progress of democracy."
German authorities had cited national rules banning representatives of foreign governments from campaigning on German soil within three months of polls in their country.
Erdoğan has mooted holding a referendum on reintroducing the death penalty in the wake of a failed military coup last July which saw more than 200 people killed.
Asked if a subsequent purge, in which tens of thousands of people have been jailed or lost their jobs, showed Turkey was moving away from democracy, Erdoğan hit back, saying that European countries had taken "a full week" to condemn the coup attempt.
"On that very night nobody condemned it. On the contrary it seemed that the West preferred the attempted coup over democracy itself," he told the broadcaster.
