Why the EU enables Türkiye's autocracy
01 April 2025
Europe pulled out the big guns. In response to tear gas, rubber bullets, beatings, and over 1,900 arrested protestors, journalists, academics, and students, the EU did what it does best: it issued a statement. "Türkiye must uphold democratic values." Two weeks into the largest protest movement in Turkish history since the Gezi Park protests of 2013, we haven't heard more than that.
The EU's muted response reveals just how dependent the Union is on Türkiye and how the European 'bastion of democracy' chooses to ignore the much-cited EU values when it doesn't fit the current agenda.
But why? Türkiye has the largest refugee population in the world. More than four million registered (mostly Syrian) refugees are in the country, with millions more unregistered. To decrease migrant arrivals consistently, the EU has paid Türkiye more than €9 billion since 2016 to reduce migration to the Union at all costs.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan knows how to use this as leverage. He repeatedly threatened to "open the gates", i.e. increasing migration to the EU, whenever he faced criticism for his actions. Allowing a president whose autocratic governance increasingly mirrors that of Russian president Vladimir Putin to blackmail an entire continent isn't a good look.
Besides migration, the EU needs Türkiye for defence. After the increasingly protectionist and Putin-friendly Americans, Türkiye boasts the second-largest army in NATO. The alliance's Secretary-General Mark Rutte recently urged EU leaders to improve ties with Türkiye to support Ukraine and other defence matters.
 | Yakup Can Yargıç and Hazar Deniz Eker Just because the EU needs Türkiye doesn't mean that it holds no leverage in return. Future aid, migration deals, or military cooperation should be conditional on democratic reform in the country. The same principle is applied to Poland or Hungary when rule of law violations are criticised, so why not here? It wasn't always like this. Back in 2016, the EU suspended accession talks with Türkiye over human rights concerns. In case everyone in Brussels has since checked out, here's a reminder of how the human rights situation is nine years later: bad. Between mass incarcerations of opposition politicians, journalists, and activists and a presidential reform to consolidate power under a single leader, plenty has happened under Erdoğan's government that should make the EU question their partnership. Even if we slept through all that, the nationwide protests, including an estimated 2.2 million people, according to the opposition in Istanbul on Saturday, should be tough to ignore. Even from as far as Brussels. |
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