​Really, Mrs. Merkel?

TURKEY - In Brief 05 Sep 2017 by Atilla Yesilada

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Pressured by her Social Democrat rival Mr. Schultz, Chancellor Merkel was forced to promise to end or suspend Turkish accession on Sunday in a televised debate. I waited until Wednesday to cover this story, because she seemed evasive in her response to Schultz. However in Tuesday, in her speech to Bundestag, she repeated her promise, which now becomes policy. It is not easy to end or suspend accession procedures. Politically disengaging from a regional giant like Turkey is very costly for EU. Can a compromise be found? At the end, if worse comes to worst, does it really matter? It is now certain that Mrs. Merkel (whom I predict to win the general elections) will table a motion to end or suspend accession talks with Turkey in EU leaders’ summit in October. I seriously doubt consensus can be reached on the first request (it requires unanimity to end accession), but a decision to suspend accession until Turkey meets certain conditions are a possibility. Yet I won’t deny the furious debate in Brussels between Turkey hawks who want to punish Turkey to elicit “behavioral modification” and the doves who prefer dialogue, pointing on important linkages such as the Refugee Readmission Treaty, energy connections and of course the huge number of ethnic Turks on EU soil. Disengagement from Turkey is not an option for EU. But, what options are there, given my conjecture that Erdogan prefers to end accession? The first option is Mrs. Merkel’s old suggestion of a “privileged partnership”, which is a blank canvas, which will take years of painstaking inter-EU negotiations to fill before a reasonable offer can be made to Turkey. Let’s skip that, it won’t fill the current and urgent need...