Anyone in Europe who had worked with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in the past months probably saw it coming: the death of the European Union’s refugee deal with Turkey. With Davutoglu effectively out of the picture, the increasingly autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears intent on blowing up the deal.
President Erdogan is a proud man. His Trump-like compulsory obsession with his image has led him to persecute thousands of people and punish journalists and columnists. He pressed the German government to prosecute a German comedian who ridiculed Erdogan on television -- Germany has a sizable Turkish minority that may vote in Turkish elections -- and just last week demanded that the CEO of Germany’s largest media conglomerate be prosecuted. A German court was quick to reject that latest demand.
No one can be sure what precisely goes on inside Erdogan’s head. But maybe it is more than a coincidence that the deal on refugee resettlement between the European Union and Turkey has been collapsing fast since the political decapitation of Davutoglu and the dust-ups with European comedians. Erdogan recently forced Davutoglu to resign, probably because the prime minister was getting a bit too popular for Erdogan’s liking.
The resulting death of the refugee deal would be a severe blow to European leaders.
See here and here for a quick refresher on the deal. After months of negotiations, the European Union and Turkey agreed to send refugees crossing from Turkey into Greece, an EU member state, back to Turkey.
In return Turkey would get a number of things, including something deemed very important to many Turks: visa liberalization, freeing them up to travel inside the European Union. Arranging this would mean a big popularity boost for Erdogan, who is believed to be considering calling new parliamentary elections to gain enough seats to change the Constitution, with the goal of giving more executive powers to the presidency, in effect making Erdogan the country’s supreme leader.
In Erdogan’s warped world view it is incomprehensible that a powerful German government such as Angela Merkel’s is unable to stop the insults befalling him. In Turkey, whenever someone offends Erdogan -- even so much as ‘liking’ a post on Facebook criticizing him -- he has the offender arrested on some trumped-up charge and thrown into jail. Merkel does not do this because she cannot (and very likely would not), thanks to the separation of powers that exists between the government and the judiciary in her country. Erdogan probably thinks Merkel simply doesn’t want to help him.
Return of the Sea of Death
And so he is ratcheting up the rhetoric. Just an hour after firing Davutoglu, Erdogan launched his first torpedoes at the EU-Turkey deal. He also directly took on the European Parliament, which has been very outspoken in its criticism of Erdogan’s increasingly dictatorial style. The Parliament has threatened to block a procedure required for the visa liberalization unless Turkey agrees to a set of 72 demands laid out by the European Union. Among them is a reform of Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws.
Erdogan flatly rejected this. The chairman of the European Parliament fired back, stating that he would freeze the visa vote procedure. Just a few hours later came what seems to be the death knell for the deal: a direct adviser to Erdogan tweeted that if the EU does not lift its visa limitations, Turkey would declare the deal null and void and unleash refugees held up in the country on the EU’s borders.
This was the kind of blackmail some in Europe feared, but most thought it was a line Erdogan would not cross. The European Union appears to be late in discovering that the man who recently had one of Vladimir Putin's warplanes shot down is scared of no one, let alone a bunch of frazzled European politicians.
If anyone is scared, it is those very European politicians. At home, right-wing anti-refugee parties are killing it in the polls, even threatening Angela Merkel’s previously strong power base. A new poll showed that 64 percent of Germans think she shouldn’t run for re-election. This while just a year ago she was riding high in popularity polls.
The first half of 2017 will see general elections in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. It is no surprise that the EU-Turkey deal, originally drafted by a think tank, was first picked up by Merkel and then quickly supported by the social-democratic coalition party in the Dutch government.
With the EU-Turkey agreement all but dead, chances are that Europe will this summer once again see video images of dinghies crammed with refugees, drowned children, and desperate asylum seekers attacking barbed wire fences put up in the Balkans and Greece, which seems destined to become one big refugee camp.
For Europe’s leaders, it’s back to the drawing table. Only this time there are no Houdini-like escapes: they either let refugees in and arrange a proper stay, or they keep them out. More than refugees will drown in the Aegean waters; Europe’s soul will submerge with them.
