French magazine Le Point said it has been harassed and intimidated by supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after it called him “The Dictator” on its cover.
Police were deployed in the southern city of Avignon over the weekend, after a group of pro-Erdogan advocates attempted to remove, then cover up advertisements for the magazine at newsstands.
Another poster of the cover — a portrait of Erdogan above the headline “The Dictator. How far will Erdogan go?” — was on Sunday targeted at a newspaper kiosk in the town of Valence, Le Point said.
“After a week of harassment, insults, intimidation and anti-Semitic slurs and threats toward us on social media, now has come the moment when supporters of the AKP [Justice and Development Party] are attacking symbols of freedom of expression and diversity in the press,” Le Point said on its Web site.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday rallied behind the magazine, calling the harassment “totally unacceptable.”
“You cannot put a price on freedom of the press, without it, it’s dictatorship,” he said on Twitter.
The left-leaning weekly, one of France’s most popular news magazines, published an investigation into the Turkish president in its latest edition, which also included an editorial asking: “Is Erdogan a new Hitler?”
Erdogan and the AKP, which he cofounded in 2001, are seeking another mandate ahead of snap parliamentary and presidential polls on June 24.
Erdogan imposed a state of emergency following an attempted coup in July 2016, which has sparked a crackdown affecting “hundreds of thousands of people,” including killings and torture, according to the UN rights office.
The report in March also warned about “a continued erosion of the rule of law and deterioration of the human rights situation,” including the arrests of hundreds of journalists and opposition members.
Ankara said the findings were “biased” and “unacceptable.”
The incidents in France were “isolated, but have a strong symbolic resonance,” Reporters Without Borders director-general Christophe Deloire said.
A leading figure in France’s ruling Republic on the Move party, Richard Ferrand, called the protests in southern France an “unacceptable breach of the freedom of expression.”
“We are not going to tolerate in France that the front cover of a magazine be somehow censored under pressure,” he told the France 3 channel on Sunday.
Many European nations are home to large Turkish-origin or migrant communities, but Germany, Austria and the Netherlands have barred Turkish politicians from electioneering in their countries.
About 3 million expatriate Turks are allowed to vote in the elections next month, including 1.4 million in Germany, and they are seen as a valuable source of support by Erdogan’s party.
A year ago, Germany and other European nations also banned a series of planned Turkish campaign events for a referendum that extended Erdogan’s powers.
Erdogan at the time denounced Germany’s “Nazi practices” and accused it of harboring Kurdish “terrorists” and plotters of the failed coup against him.
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