How
the EU helped to erode Turkish democracy
By ESZTER ZALAN
BRUSSELS, TODAY,
19:50
Turkey
is strong, Europe is weak.
That is the image
promoted by the Turkish government at a time when the EU has little
political leverage on Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan due to
refugee crisis.
Europe is partly
responsible for getting itself into the situation.
By neglecting the
accession process for decades, the EU has contributed to
strengthening Erdogan’s authoritarian grip on power. It now finds
itself sidelining its own values in return for Ankara’s help on
migration, Turkish liberals and analysts say.
“There is lot of
disappointment, from certain parts of Turkish society, that the EU is
ready to turn a blind eye on the human rights violations, the
fighting in the Kurdish areas, the government rolling back on
fundamental rights,” Amanda Paul, a Turkey expert at the European
Policy Center (EPC), a think tank in Brussels, told EUobserver.
“All this has
bolstered president Erdogan, who uses it to shore up support for his
constitutional reform to cement his grip on power,” she said.
Erdogan’s stated
aim is to alter the Turkish charter to centralise power in his
presidential palace.
The EU has struggled
to come up with its own solution on how to handle the tens of
thousands of asylum seekers coming each month via Turkey and Greece
to the core of Europe.
Most of the people
are fleeing war in Iraq and Syria, with Turkey itself home to 2.7
million Syrian refugees.
The situation led to
a hasty EU-Turkey deal in which EU leaders promised €6 billion,
visa-free travel, and faster accession talks in return for Turkey’s
help.
With Erdogan guilty
of increasing disdain for human rights, that promise puts the EU in
an awkward position.
Turkish analysts
said that Erdogan is using the EU accord to legitimise his internal
crackdown. He seized a top opposition daily on the eve of one recent
EU summit. His military attacks on Kurdish militants in south-east
Turkey have displaced 150,000 people.
Cengiz Aktar, a
professor of political science in Istanbul, told EUobserver that
Turkey is becoming increasingly undemocratic.
"The
legislation that is produced by the [Ankara] parliament is 180
degrees opposite to the acquis communautaire,” he said, referring
to the corpus of EU law.
Yavuz Baydar, a
liberal Turkish journalist and a co-founder of P24, the Platform for
Independent Media, said Turkey had all the power because it could
break off the migrant deal at any moment.
He said EU leaders
let the Turkish government “play them like a yoyo”.
He cited the example
of German comedian Jan Boehmermann, who faces prosecution in Germany
for a satirical poem on Erdogan, after Turkey put pressure on Berlin
to let the case go ahead.
“There is an
intrusion of authoritarian mentality represented by the ruling AKP
party into Germany,” Baydar said.
“Erdogan wants to
copy-paste what [Russian president Vladimir] Putin has done with
western Europe - to depict himself as a powerful leader, the father
of the nation, who is standing up to Europe,” he said.
Strategic thinking?
It didn’t have to
be that way, the experts noted.
Turkey has been an
EU acession candidate since 1999 and negotiations started in 2005.
But out of the 35 chapters in the EU rulebook, just one has been
closed.
“If the EU had
kept the dialogue open over the past decades, if accession chapters
had been opened, Turkey’s democracy may not be in such a bad
state,” the EPC’s Amanda Paul said.
“They [EU] are
reaping what they sowed,” she said.
Kati Piri, a Dutch
centre-left MEP who is the European Parliament rapporteur for Turkey,
said Turkish authorities are first and foremost to blame for the
erosion of democratic norms.
But she added: “Our
non-engagement has not helped the situation.”
EU commission deputy
head Frans Timmermans has also said that non-engagement made matters
worse.
“All those years
that we sort of felt comfortable by ignoring them [Turks], but not
engaging with them have done nothing to improve the situation in
Turkey, on the contrary,” Timmermans said in a speech at the EU
parliament last week.
He said the EU
should open two sensitive accession chapters, on fundamental rights
and justice.
“The EU’s policy
has not been helpful to reform-oriented forces in Turkey, NGOs, civil
society,” the EPC’s Paul told EUobserver.
She said it Germany
had blocked many of the chapters, but German leader Angela Merkel is
now at the forefront of EU efforts to keep the Turkey migrant deal
alive.
“Lack of strategic
thinking has led us here,” Paul said.
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