Ankara, Brussels and the elephant in the room

With helicopters flying over Schuman square and the EU institutions, Turkey’s strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Brussels, the European Union’s de facto capital, to negotiate the price for keeping almost 3.7 million migrants inside his country.
It became blatantly obvious for everyone on hand that the migration deal achieved in 2016 between Turkey and the EU, which included €6 billion to look after the refugees, is on life support. All of the parties involved, however, were acting as if there was no elephant in the room.
Coronavirus concerns were not the only reason that the two sides did not shake hands during the meeting. Both EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, the Council’s head, were standing awkwardly next to Erdogan as they knew their pie-in-the-sky rhetoric of solidarity, which is most commonly used for pleasing the EU-27’s leaders, would not be enough to woo Erdogan.
“It is the beginning of the restart of dialogue with Turkey,” von der Leyen said prior to the meeting with Erdogan, without providing any concrete clues as to what the EU is pursuing in its relations with Ankara, but hoping that the country adheres to the migration deal.
Turkey and the EU seem to be on different pages when it comes to any sort of agreement about a revised migrant deal, with the former seeking concrete progress by the next EU Council summit scheduled for March 26, and the EU asking it’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell to work with Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, to find some sort of middle ground that would satisfy both sides.
Cavusoglu, on the contrary, maintained a hardline stance against the EU and accusing Brussels of breaching the 2016 migration agreement, he demanded that it do and pay more to support the migrants. Voices in the European Parliament were unusually very critical towards Turkey and called out Erdogan for attempting to crudely blackmail Europe into agreeing to a deal that would support Turkey’s military and political ambitions in Syria, Libya, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Manfred Weber, the EPP’s Chairman, prior to Erdogan’s visit, laid out the situation in the sort of stark terms that both the Council and the Commission cannot. “If you want more, like lifting visa restrictions, we want to discuss illegal gas drilling in Cypriot waters. If you want to talk trade, we need to talk to you about the rule of law.”
The EU’s “proper dialogue with Turkey,” as the Commission envisaged, didn’t materialise at the March 10 meeting in Brussels. “If the EU delivers on its promises made to us, then we will, of course, respond in kind,” Erdogan said after he returned to Turkey. “We’ve been asking for a fair share of the burden. Unfortunately, they are not lifting visas for a country like Turkey but doing that for Latin American countries, the Balkans and Ukraine.”
Returning from the Brussels’ talks, Erdogan offered to convene a summit on migration with Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel (and possibly Boris Johnson) on March 17. Turkey will not “close the gates” to the migrants that are attempting to illegally cross into Europe, but instead demanded that Greece open the way for thousands of people to cross the border legally and to allow them to disperse across Europe without being stopped by border police – a move that Erdogan labelled “humane sharing”.
In the wake of the meeting, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and Portugal announced that they would settle around 1,500 unaccompanied minors.
At the same time, Erdogan is steadily working to forge ties with allies that he hopes will help him do his bidding with the European establishment. Before meeting with senior EU officials, Erdogan held talks with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s chief, asking for “concrete support” from the North Atlantic alliance in the war in Syria.
Stoltenberg reassured Erdogan of the alliance’s backing of Turkey’s positions in Syria and reminded Erdogan could count on air support and surveillance drones.
Apparently, the Commission’s wish to “go back to a semblance of normality” in its relations with Turkey is already becoming a reality as Erdogan neither waits for or needs permission to advance his migration game. Time is running out, however, for the European Union to realise that Greece’s borders are also Europe’s external boundaries.