Turkey criticizes German 'populism' after Merkel shift on EU membership

[Zibago]

Turkey criticizes German 'populism' after Merkel shift on EU membership


FILE PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel meets Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the eve of the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 6, 2017. REUTERS/Michael Kappeler,POOL
Reuters Staff

2 MIN READ

ANKARA (Reuters) - A spokesman for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accused German politicians on Monday of indulging in populism after Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would seek an end to Ankara’s European Union membership talks.

Merkel, seeking a fourth term in office in Germany’s Sept. 24 election, said in a debate on Sunday it was clear that Turkey should not join the European Union, and that she would talk to other EU leaders about ending its stalled accession process.

“It is not a coincidence that our president Erdogan was the main topic of the debate,” Erdogan’s spokesman Ibrahim Kalin tweeted, criticizing what he described as mainstream German politicians’ “indulgence in populism”.

“Germany and Europe’s attacks on Turkey/Erdogan, by ignoring essential and urgent problems, are reflections of the narrowing of their horizons,” he said.

“We hope that the problematic atmosphere that made Turkish-German relations the victim of this narrow political horizon will end”.

Turkey’s ties with Germany and several other EU states have deteriorated sharply this year. Points of dispute have included the barring of Turkish politicians from holding campaign rallies in EU countries ahead of an April referendum, and concerns over the powers granted to Erdogan in the closely fought plebiscite.

Turkey has also restricted access for German parliamentarians seeking to visit German troops at the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, leading Berlin to announce it was moving those forces out of Turkey. It has also detained several German nationals, including journalist Deniz Yucel.

Turkey says it has sent Germany an extradition request for one of the main suspects it says was behind an attempted military coup in July 2016. More than 50,000 people have been arrested and 150,000 have been suspended or sacked in a security crackdown since the failed putsch.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...r-merkel-shift-on-eu-membership-idUSKCN1BF0XE

 

[Joe Shearer]

@Zibago

I asked this on another of your threads: what is the direction that Turkey wishes to take? Is there some thinking about this at all, or is their leadership lurching from one fixed idea to another? Besides jettisoning Attaturk, and turning back to a more conservative Islamic standpoint, what do they want to do?

In part, this question is due to an inability to see very many options for the Turkish. It cannot be a falling back on regional relationships; Iran is unlikely to develop very warm ties with an historical rival; the Saudis, the Gulf states and Jordan and Syria are hardly substitutes for the EU. Pakistan is a bit too far away; apart from rhetoric, it is difficult to foresee any significant economic or political gain.

What is Erdogan up to?

 

[SoulSpokesman]

Dada,

What about a bid for leadership of the Islamic world? Besides, Turkey will never ever be fully accepted as part of the EU.

Regards

 

[Zibago]

I asked this on another of your threads: what is the direction that Turkey wishes to take? Is there some thinking about this at all, or is their leadership lurching from one fixed idea to another? Besides jettisoning Attaturk, and turning back to a more conservative Islamic standpoint, what do they want to do?

The elections represent will of their people for a change in their system which we respect. Forcing Turkey to change will not work for Europe they have to work with Turkey under the new system

In part, this question is due to an inability to see very many options for the Turkish. It cannot be a falling back on regional relationships; Iran is unlikely to develop very warm ties with an historical rival; the Saudis, the Gulf states and Jordan and Syria are hardly substitutes for the EU. Pakistan is a bit too far away; apart from rhetoric, it is difficult to foresee any significant economic or political gain.

Europe will not sanction Turkey its all tough talk they will keep a working relation with them with only small slaps on wrists when shit flies too much
Coming the question why Erdogan is doing it? Simple its what is important for Turkey and his govt the more assertive he is the more his country gains from an unstable region where alliances are made broken in mere months
Expect new antics by EU on the Kurdish issue things will get rather interesting after the German elections where tough talk on Tukrey is seen as an actual issue

 

[Joe Shearer]

The elections represent will of their people for a change in their system which we respect. Forcing Turkey to change will not work for Europe they have to work with Turkey under the new system

Europe will not sanction Turkey its all tough talk they will keep a working relation with them with only small slaps on wrists when shit flies too much
Coming the question why Erdogan is doing it? Simple its what is important for Turkey and his govt the more assertive he is the more his country gains from an unstable region where alliances are made broken in mere months
Expect new antics by EU on the Kurdish issue things will get rather interesting after the German elections where tough talk on Tukrey is seen as an actual issue

Illuminating. Thanks. I know very little about post-Ataturk Turkey, that is, contemporary Turkey.

 

[Zibago]

I am trying to be diplomatic in my statement but best analogy for what Turkey wants is what citizens of your country want @Joe Shearer just change religions and rivals

A strong Turkey that is assertive in the region and has a strong and stable govt and economy that is what they want i have actually felt that over the last few years the support for EU membership has declined somewhat @HAKIKAT
Agree or disagree?

 

[SoulSpokesman]

Zibago sb,

That seems to be a wonderful summing up.

Regards

 

[T-123456]

@Zibago

I asked this on another of your threads: what is the direction that Turkey wishes to take? Is there some thinking about this at all, or is their leadership lurching from one fixed idea to another? Besides jettisoning Attaturk, and turning back to a more conservative Islamic standpoint, what do they want to do?

In part, this question is due to an inability to see very many options for the Turkish. It cannot be a falling back on regional relationships; Iran is unlikely to develop very warm ties with an historical rival; the Saudis, the Gulf states and Jordan and Syria are hardly substitutes for the EU. Pakistan is a bit too far away; apart from rhetoric, it is difficult to foresee any significant economic or political gain.

What is Erdogan up to?

Erdogan knows what to do(the Norway option or Swiss model) but he wont,he will probably sing ''Shout shout,let it all out''(tears for fears) and maybe threaten the EU with sending the refugees to Europe.

 

[Joe Shearer]

I am trying to be diplomatic in my statement but best analogy for what Turkey wants is what citizens of your country want @Joe Shearer just change religions and rivals

A strong Turkey that is assertive in the region and has a strong and stable govt and economy that is what they want i have actually felt that over the last few years the support for EU has declined somewhat @HAKIKAT
Agree or disagree?

Needless to add, I disagree with @SoulSpokesman , and also to some extent with you. I don't think that the citizens of India want to victimise the minorities in the vicious, pit-bull fashion of, say, our Yogi Chief Minister, or that unspeakable little pustule, Ananth Hegde; there are many others contending for bigot of the week positions.

If you were to ask the silent majority, it is likely that the real consensual position that would emerge is that most Indians, specifically, most Indians from the majority religion, would like to see a country where Hindus need not be afraid; they lost their fear under the British, in spite of being subjected to a variety of insidious assaults on their identity and their self-confidence, hand in hand with the looting that reduced an economy with nearly a quarter of the world's economic activity to one with less than 5% of the action.

Politics apart, there has also been a coarsening of public discourse. Perhaps a reasonable explanation of the boorish behaviour that we see of late lies in the tsunami of urbanisation that has taken place. I could ask you to look at the urban-rural divide in 1947, and to compare it with the figures relating to today; you can see, combining the percentages and the absolute numbers, that there has been a mind-numbing exodus from the villages to the towns, and to the cities. One reason behind the sclerotic condition of our urban spaces.

Another reason emerges from the horrid expansion of our professional education at the cost of quality, and the even greater cost of a complete abandonment of humanities education. What we have now is a leavening of the former middle classes by a rural segment, trained in technology, insufficiently equipped to get jobs, but when in jobs, earning huge salaries compared to their parental generation. A complication is that most of these people have had to earn their livings in direct proximity to supercilious, racist Europeans and Americans. The result has been to build into place, almost permanently, a huge inferiority complex, which has to find expression somewhere in an effort to seek parity. These are the people who @Kaptaan, @PAKISTANFOREVER, @DESERTFIGHTER, @American Pakistani and others love to hate.

This combination of wealth and lack of education - unless one makes a huge stretch and equates the technical training that is imparted with education in the classical sense - leads to a questing, seeking Internet-oriented mass that is only too ready to translate their complexes into the paradigms so obligingly supplied to them by a political segment that feels that they are the proper heirs to the Hindu heritage, and spread their distorted quasi-Hindu philosophy as the real thing.

I don't know that this, and the fact that the winning combination that Modi forged, constituted of a hard core of bigots, a larger mass of disappointed consumerists frustrated by the abrupt end to the years of milk and honey of UPA I, and a small group of opportunists who zigged when they should have, indeed, zigged, constitutes a comparable phenomenon to what is happening in Turkey. Not knowing, can't say; I'll take your word for it, but with a caveat (so to speak; the word means something entirely different from the way it is used here, as a synonym for 'reserve').

My apologies for the rant; it is frustrating to see these various currents and strands being conflated into one broad, thick reversion to primitive Sati-worshipping regression. Intelligent right wingers (politeness being the key to an exchange of ideas) like @SoulSpokesman and @SarthakGanguly attribute the current situation to a reversion to type after years of political distortion of the people's desires, but that is begging the question. They cannot deny, I think, that these changes are fortuitous, and promoted more by the demographic currents that I have mentioned, rather than a conscious winning back of their manifest destiny by a resurgent India, which is the model that they would like to promote.

 

[T-123456]

Illuminating. Thanks. I know very little about post-Ataturk Turkey, that is, contemporary Turkey.

Dont be so humble ''old man'',you know much about contemporary Turkiye.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Erdogan knows what to do(the Norway option or Swiss model) but he wont,he will probably sing ''Shout shout,let it all out''(tears for fears) and maybe threaten the EU with sending the refugees to Europe.

Ah, here you are; I should have been asking you, although @Zibago gave a pretty lucid explanation, I thought (one that I disagree with, in minor part).

Norway or the Swiss, eh? With but not of. That does seem like a transitional point, and if the Norwegians and the Swiss (and soon, the British) can survive and thrive, why not Turkey?

The threat of refugees to Europe will, of course, pucker a great many sphincters.

 

[SoulSpokesman]

Dada,

They cannot deny, I think, that these changes are fortuitous, and promoted more by the demographic currents that I have mentioned,

Of course I dont deny. As we have discussed in several forums (or is it fora?), these swings right/leftwards are cyclical trends, we are perhaps in a rightwards lurch right now. But if the RW fails to meet popular aspirations, the pendulum cud swing the other way. I dont know.

Regards

 

[Joe Shearer]

Dont be so humble ''old man'',you know much about contemporary Turkiye.

Not really; you might be disagreeably surprised.

Actually, with two years between buying books as I was used to, and away from my existing books, and my own things, I've become jaded and find it hard to form an opinion based on proper ground work. You must have seen the drop in quality; it's one reason why I stayed away. Did not want to lower the standards I thought appropriate at the beginning.

One reason for the humility; it doesn't come naturally.

 

[T-123456]

Not really; you might be disagreeably surprised.

Actually, with two years between buying books as I was used to, and away from my existing books, and my own things, I've become jaded and find it hard to form an opinion based on proper ground work. You must have seen the drop in quality; it's one reason why I stayed away. Did not want to lower the standards I thought appropriate at the beginning.

One reason for the humility; it doesn't come naturally.

That is the reason for many.

A strong Turkey that is assertive in the region and has a strong and stable govt and economy that is what they want

But currently my country is none of the above and it doesnt look like its going to change any soon or in the further future.

Norway or the Swiss, eh? With but not of. That does seem like a transitional point, and if the Norwegians and the Swiss (and soon, the British) can survive and thrive, why not Turkey?

Its either that or forget the EU which we cant afford in our current economic situation(50% EU trade).

 

[Joe Shearer]

That is the reason for many.


But currently my country is none of the above and it doesnt look like its going to change any soon or in the further future.


Its either that or forget the EU which we cant afford in our current economic situation(50% EU trade).

That was the reason for my query. I thought Turkey was too closely engaged to be able to withdraw in any good order.