Turkish upheaval throws doubt on EU visas and accession

In Brussels, as elsewhere around the world, the news took everyone by surprise. On Friday night, as Eurocrats were finishing another long week dominated by the shock British referendum result, and the terror attack in Nice, news began to filter through of violence on the streets of Ankara and Istanbul.

For the European Union, the military coup against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is deeply unsettling.

The official response was initially cautious. Within the first 24 hours, the heads of the European Commission and Council, in line with Berlin and Washington, expressed support for the "democratically elected government". Newly appointed British foreign secretary Boris Johnson went further, confirming in an interview on Saturday he had underlined British support for the government in a phone call with Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

It took the centre-left group in the European Parliament, the Socialists and Democrats, to say what many people in Brussels were thinking. In a statement on Saturday morning the group said that while "any coup against democracy must be condemned . . . our severe judgment of President Erdogan, who is responsible for anti-democratic tendencies in Turkey against political opponents, freedom of the media and human rights, remains unchanged".

By Monday, at a scheduled meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, the message had become a lot more nuanced. During a discussion over lunch, EU foreign ministers were broadly in agreement that Turkey’s democratically elected government should be supported, but they differed in how much criticism should be levelled at Erdogan.

In the end, conclusions from the European Council meeting said the EU strongly condemned the coup in Turkey, but the statement also urged restraint, calling for the country’s constitutional order to be respected and making specific reference to the European Convention on Human Rights’s prohibition of the death penalty.

Refugee deal

The dramatic developments in Turkey have taken place at a sensitive time in EU-Turkish relations. The last 10 months have witnessed unprecedented engagement by the EU with Ankara prompted by the refugee crisis, a development already criticised by human rights groups. The EU-Turkey plan agreed in March saw the EU offer visa liberalisation, €6 billion and the opening of chapters in the country’s EU accession process to Turkey in exchange for help with tackling the migration crisis.

The deal, masterminded by German chancellor Angela Merkel, worked. Three months later the number of migrants entering the EU through the Turkey-Greece route has slowed to a trickle. Before the military coup, the Erdogan government even looked set to pass changes to anti-terror legislation in parliament required by the EU to move forward with visa and accession talks.

The developments over the weekend have dramatically changed the state of play.

Erdogan’s promise to “clean the virus” that spawned the coup is already under way, as thousands have been detained. Whatever the doubts about Turkey’s ability to fulfil the criteria for visa liberalisation before the coup, the country is now more likely to breach standards on rule of law and freedom of speech demanded by the EU. The possibility of the reintroduction of the death penalty, abolished in 2004 as a condition of Turkey’s EU membership talks, would mark the end of its EU aspirations.

Accession negotiations

Privately, this may be welcomed by EU leaders. With elections in

France

and

Germany

next year, leaders know there is little public appetite to grant visa-free access to Turkish citizens or to speed up accession negotiations. The political crackdown in Turkey will give the EU the pretext for stalling negotiations they never truly supported in the first place.

While Turkey could threaten to drop its side of the bargain, allowing the flow of refugees to resume, in reality the momentum which saw hundreds of thousands of refugees travel via Turkey to the EU last summer has been halted. Given the climate in Turkey, those fleeing the war in Syria are likely to choose other routes.

The political developments in Turkey could also hamper one of the few bright spots in the European landscape – the ongoing settlement talks on Cyprus. While Cyprus is still bruised by what it perceives as unreasonable demands from the European Commission in March over the EU-Turkey deal, there had been real hopes a deal would be agreed for the EU member by the end of 2016.

Erdogan’s focus on domestic events means an imminent agreement on one of the unresolved issues – the presence of 30,000 Turkish troops in the north of Cyprus – is less likely. Hope of a settlement to the 42-year Cypriot conflict may be one of the casualties of the military coup that has destabilised a nation.