Turkish power struggle threatens EU migrant deal

A pivotal deal to staunch the flow of migrants from Turkey into the EU, masterminded by Angela Merkel, German chancellor, is in doubt after Turkey’s pro-European prime minister resigned.

Ahmet Davutoglu, who personally negotiated the deal with Ms Merkel, quit on Thursday following a power struggle with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The premier’s departure imperils an agreement credited with sharply reducing the influx of asylum-seekers into the EU — and rescuing Ms Merkel from a potentially fatal political backlash.

The deal enables the EU to send migrants arriving illegally on the Greek islands back to Turkey in exchange for visa requirements on Turkish visitors being eased and financial aid. However, President Erdogan has responded coolly towards the agreement struck by his premier and has shown increasing hostility towards the EU.

Without reforms to Turkey’s antiterrorism and anti-corruption laws, which Mr Erdogan has angrily resisted, Brussels may be unable to grant some of the most important concessions in the deal — a move that Ankara has already warned would cancel its obligation to curtail refugee crossings into Greece.

“We’ve made good progress on the agreement with Turkey,” Ms Merkel said in Rome on Thursday. “The European Union, or at least Germany and Italy, are prepared and stand by the commitments that we’ve agreed to. We hope that’s mutual.”

To keep the pact on track, Ankara must still meet several benchmarks, including major revisions to its antiterrorism legislation to ensure civil liberties, that Mr Erdogan has been loath to support. EU officials are now concerned that Ankara will backtrack on reform commitments.

“It’s certainly not good news for us,” said the EU official. “Erdogan would be very ill-advised to throw this out of the window and think this is now a matter of horse-trading. He thinks it’s 50 per cent wriggle room, and the rest is all arm-wrestling.”

Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat at the Carnegie Europe think-tank, said that Mr Erdogan had been “much more categorical” in resisting changes to the antiterrorism law, adding that, with his AK party and parliament in disarray, the chances of reforms being passed in time for a June deadline was becoming increasingly unlikely.

When Ms Merkel set out to persuade sceptical EU countries to back the migrant deal, one of her central arguments, according to diplomats, was that it would shore up the pro-European faction in Ankara, led by Mr Davutoglu.

Instead, the deal hastened the demise of her main Turkish ally and left the pro-Europeans seriously weakened. President Erdogan saw Mr Davutoglu’s increasingly close relationship with the EU as a threat. A rift between the two men turned into a power struggle which the prime minister lost.

“He got a little too independent for Erdogan’s tastes,” said a senior EU official involved in the recent negotiations with Ankara. “Merkel bet her money on the wrong horse. She thought she could strengthen Davutoglu’s hand in Turkey, [but] Erdogan got incredibly nervous that Davutoglu was gaining international stature, becoming a real rival.”

Ms Merkel’s defenders insist she did not put all her eggs in the Davutoglu basket, noting that she braved domestic criticism last year by visiting Mr Erdogan in Istanbul on the eve of parliamentary elections — knowing he would exploit it for electoral purposes.

“She tried to have a working relationship with both of them,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “She knew that dealing with Turkey carried certain risks.”

Merkel’s sleepless nights over Turkey and refugees are now back, just when it appeared EU-Turkey relations were moving on autopilot. The EU doesn’t like Erdogan and never liked Merkel’s deal

But critics worry that the progress made in recent weeks, where Turkish officials rushed to complete reforms required as part of a new visa-free travel deal with the EU, could be lost without Mr Davutoglu driving it across a June finish line, raising the prospect that Ankara could renege on its commitments to crack down on the refugee influx.

“Merkel’s sleepless nights over Turkey and refugees are now back, just when it appeared EU-Turkey relations were moving on autopilot,” said Mujtaba Rahman, head of European analysis at the Eurasia Group risk consultancy. “The EU doesn’t like Erdogan and never liked Merkel’s deal.”

EU officials said that they believed that the visa-waiver deal was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” in the Davutoglu-Erdogan rift. The final breakdown came just hours after the European Commission recommended the deal go forward Wednesday, with the Brussels leadership making clear they saw it as a way to pull Ankara back into the EU’s sphere.

“They’re not coming closer to us in terms of democracy, human rights and freedom of the media; they’re going away from us,” said Frans Timmermans, the commission vice-president who has overseen implementation of the Turkey deal. “That trend needs to be changed, and it can only be changed if we engage with them.”

But in the weeks leading up to the decision, EU officials said they could sense a shift in mood, with Turks associated with the pro-European claque around Mr Davutoglu raising concerns about the lack of consultation with Mr Erodogan.

Turkish officials say that the Turkish president was incensed by images of Mr Davutoglu happily escorting Ms Merkel and other EU leaders to refugee camps in the south-eastern border city of Gaziantep two weeks ago, viewing it as an attempt to usurp him on the international stage.

In his resignation speech, Mr Davutoglu tried to solidify Turkey’s relationship with Brussels: “The doors of the EU are now open following the visa deal,” he said.

But European lawmakers who must now approve the deal say they are becoming increasingly wary.

“If this was an isolated incident, you could say it’s just an internal affair,” said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch liberal who has become a leading voice on Turkey in the European parliament. “But we’ve seen a series of incidents that are clearly a pattern towards authoritarianism. It’s time the EU starts to connect the dots and see it for what it is.”

Additional reporting by James Politi in Rome