German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has been criticized for pouring tea for his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu. And for saying there was nothing wrong with reinforcing Turkish tanks, despite human rights abuses.

Virtually all of Germany’s political parties came together on Monday to condemn Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel for his impromptu meeting with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu in the central German town of Goslar at the weekend.

Cem Özdemir, departing leader of the Green party, didn’t like the imagery: particularly a widely-shared picture of Gabriel, a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), pouring Cavusoglu a cup of tea. “If I’d have been representing Germany, I certainly wouldn’t have served the Turkish foreign minister with a Turkish tea service and allowed myself to be photographed doing it,” he told public broadcaster ARD on Monday morning.

This image would be understood in Turkey as a sign that “Germany was serving Turkey and the Turkish foreign minister,” added Özdemir, who might himself have angled for Gabriel’s job had the Green party’s coalition negotiations with Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) gone differently last year.

Other sections of Germany’s political spectrum made similar complaints. The Free Democratic Party (FDP) — Germany’s free-market purists — also criticized the unofficial meeting as “inappropriate” while “Germans were being kept as prisoners without charge in Turkish jails,” as FDP parliamentary leader Alexander Graf Lambsdorff put it. German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel has been kept without charge in a Turkish prison for nearly a year.

“To re-start German-Turkish relations we need clarity,” he told the WAZ newspaper. “That’s only possible if the German hostages like Deniz Yücel are released immediately. Only after that can trade, defense cooperation and other issues go back on the agenda — and not before.”

No changes in Turkey

Turkey is keen to buy German equipment to reinforce its tanks against mines laid by the “Islamic State” militia in northern Syria, and in Goslar on Saturday Gabriel appeared to suggest that “when it comes to this concrete case,” Turkey’s arguments “make sense to me.”

This drew criticism from other German politicians, not least because it had been Gabriel who, in the thick of the SPD’s election campaign last summer, had said that Germany needed to take a tougher course against Ankara. As many politicians pointed out this weekend, Turkey’s political climate has hardly become more liberal since then. “There is nothing new substantially, no change and no solution to problems, because nothing has changed about the causes of the problem,” as the CDU’s Norbert Röttgen said.

In response, Gabriel was quick to qualify his statements on Sunday. He insisted that he had used the meeting with Cavusoglu to urge Yücel’s release. and said that the government would not change its line on another joint project between German and Turkish arms companies — the building of a tank factory, which German weapons maker Rheinmetall was keen to be part of, despite much protest.