By ROD NORDLAND and JAMES KANTERNOV. 23, 2016
The New York Times
ISTANBUL — The European Parliament is likely to vote on Thursday to suspend negotiations to bring Turkey into the European Union, infuriating Ankara and possibly hastening the end of a long and troubled process.
While the vote is advisory rather than binding, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is smarting from European criticism of its crackdown on opponents and on the news media after a failed coup attempt in July. So it has suggested that, in any event, it may pull out of the process altogether if there is no progress by the end of the year. Such progress now seems improbable.
Mr. Erdogan has also said that he would approve a restoration of the death penalty, which would almost certainly force an end to any talk of Turkey joining the bloc, since a ban on capital punishment is a condition of membership.
Many policy makers and analysts criticized the European Parliament’s expected move, saying it would only push Turkey to harden its position on issues like human rights and the death penalty, while endangering cooperation on limiting refugee flows to Europe.
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“It would be a strategic stupidity of the first order for the E.U. to unilaterally abandon its relationship with Turkey,” Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, said in a Twitter post this week.
Nonetheless, at a debate in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday night, it was clear that lawmakers from most of the main parties seemed likely to vote on Thursday to suspend accession talks.
Mr. Erdogan did not wait for the formality of the vote to react with bitterness. “The E.U. Parliament resorting to such a vote means it takes terror organizations under its wings, it takes sides with them,” he said on Wednesday, addressing an Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Istanbul.
Only a few days ago, the Turkish president, according to the Hurriyet newspaper, threatened to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a body that includes China and Russia, in place of seeking membership of the European Union.
“The E.U. has been delaying us for 53 years. How can such a thing happen?” the paper quoted Mr. Erdogan as saying. Turkey first expressed interest in joining the union in the 1960s, although formal accession talks began in 2005.
The European Parliament’s vote comes at an awkward time for both the European Union and Turkey. Accession talks formally resumed this year in a limited number of areas as part of the deal to limit migration, though they could also help unlock an agreement for Cyprus, one of the longest-running disputes in the world. But talks in Switzerland between Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders collapsed on Tuesday, with no date set for resumption.
“The E.U. finds itself devoid of a flexible response toward Turkey and is now contemplating the nuclear option, suspension of negotiations,” said Sinan Ulgen, a Turkish scholar at Carnegie Europe, a foreign policy think tank in Brussels. That, he said, could threaten the refugee deal that Europe has with Turkey.
That deal, which was reached last March, provides for the union and member states to pay Turkey 3 billion euros, or about $3.2 billion, for refugee assistance in 2016 and 2017, and it foresees a further €3 billion in 2018. In exchange, Turkey agreed to help stop the flow of refugees across its border and to take back migrants rejected for asylum in Europe. Turkey hosts an estimated 2.7 million refugees or other migrants from Afghanistan, Syria and other countries.
The agreement has been broadly successful in reducing the flow into Europe. The number of migrants crossing into Greece was at about 100 or fewer a day in the last few weeks, compared with 2,000 a day last year. So far, Europe has disbursed €677 million of the promised funds, badly needed at a time of economic hardship in Turkey.
The deal was a complex one, however. It tied returns of migrants to progress on visa-free travel to Europe for Turks, as well as resettlement of registered refugees. Visa-free travel was further conditioned on Turkey modifying its antiterror legislation, but the attempted coup on July 15 led instead to even harsher tactics under extraordinary emergency powers that have seen some 40,000 people jailed and more than 100,000 fired from public sector jobs, including 15,000 on Tuesday.
That means the refugee deal could well unravel, as there seems little inclination in Ankara to liberalize its terrorism legislation or in Brussels to grant visa-free travel to Turks.
“The majority of the society has started not believing in the sincerity of the E.U.,” said Mustafa Yeneroglu, head of the Turkish Parliament’s human rights committee and a member of the governing party, the Justice and Development Party. “We have come to a point that the enmity in Europe against Turks and Islam is at a level that it does not seem possible for Turkey to become an E.U. member, despite fulfilling all conditions.”
Mr. Ulgen, the Carnegie Europe scholar, said that while the probable outcome of the European Parliament’s vote “makes the refugee deal even more tenuous,” both sides nonetheless have an interest in maintaining it. “It could lead to unraveling of the deal but does not mean the full deal will collapse, because it generates benefits for both sides.”
The possibility that the European Parliament would vote for suspension has been opposed by some of the bloc’s most senior officials.
“I believe the best way to strengthening Turkey’s democracy — the most effective way — is by engaging with Turkey, by keeping channels open,” said the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini. “If the accession process came to an end, I believe, we would both find ourselves in a lose-lose scenario.”
To formally suspend or cancel accession talks would require a vote by member states. The Parliament is voting on whether to recommend that they do that, but so far, only Austria has publicly advocated such a measure. It seems unlikely that the recommendation will gain much traction ahead of the next European Union summit meeting in December.
Nevertheless, the Parliament seems determined to make a statement in light of the antidemocratic measures Mr. Erdogan has taken in recent months.
“We can’t simply stand aside and observe; we cannot simply have business as usual,” said Manfred Weber, a German lawmaker and a leading figure in the largest political group at the Parliament, the European People’s Party. “We need to appeal to Turkey to change its course in the interest of its own citizens.”
Reinstituting the death penalty could bring Turkey’s European ambitions to a definitive end. Mr. Erdogan has been open about forging a majority in the Turkish Parliament with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party to bring back capital punishment.
In several speeches, Mr. Erdogan has noted that many other countries have capital punishment, though none of them are in the European Union. At a speech in Ankara last month, the crowd began cheering for reinstating the death penalty. “Soon, soon, don’t worry,” Mr. Erdogan said. “Our government will bring this to the Parliament and I believe it will pass, and when it comes to me I will approve it.”
Rod Nordland reported from Istanbul, and James Kanter from Brussels.
Safak Timur contributed reporting.
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