ANKARA, Turkey — The Turkish president’s patience was running out. His EU interlocutors were offering him 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) for stemming the flow of Syrian refugees to Europe.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reminded Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU Commission president, and Donald Tusk, the head of the EU Council, that a few months before they had given Greece 400 billion euros ($445 billion) to keep it afloat. According to the minutes of the meeting, Tusk replied that that money was not just for Greece but to support the entire eurozone. Erdogan said that a deal to constrain the refugees would support the Schengen visa-free travel agreement, another pan-European project.
The back-and-forth continued until Juncker pointedly recalled that the EU did Erdogan a favor the previous month. “Please note,” said Juncker, “that we postponed the progress report until after the Turkish elections, and we got criticized for this delay.” In other words, the EU delayed the release of a report highly critical of Turkey’s “progress” toward meeting EU standards of governance in order to help Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party win the general elections in November.
The revelation that the EU Commission is not above trying to influence Turkish elections appears in the minutes of the Erdogan-Tusk-Juncker meeting that took place on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Antalya on Nov. 15-16. Scans of the minutes, apparently written by EU stenographers, were published last week on a little-known Greek website.
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