Fury in Turkey over Merkel’s EU accession remark
Turkey is not ready to join the European Union now, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman said on Monday after she said during a German election debate on Sunday that Ankara “should not become a member”.
Merkel was bounced into beefing up her rhetoric on Turkey during the debate after her main challenger, Social Democrat Martin Schulz, vowed to stop Ankara’s bid to join the EU if he was elected chancellor.
Merkel said she would take up with her EU partners the issue of ending accession talks with Ankara.
“The chancellor’s words speak for themselves,” Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told a regular government news conference in Berlin.
“At the moment, Turkey is not at all in a position to join the European Union. In fact, the negotiations are dormant at the moment,” he said, adding that EU leaders would pick up the issue when they meet in October.
The Turkish government accused Merkel and Martin Schulz of practising the politics of populism and exclusion.
Ibrahim Kalın, a spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Merkel and Schulz focused on Turkey in their television encounter to divert attention from more pressing problems.
“It is not a coincidence that our president, Erdogan, was a main topic of the debate,” Kalın tweeted. “Germany and Europe’s attacks on Turkey/Erdogan, in ignoring necessary and pressing problems, are reflections of the narrowing of their horizons,” he said.
“We hope the problematic atmosphere that made TurkishGerman relations the victim of this narrow political horizon will end.”