Turkey will never become a member of the European Union, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel finally said so in public. “The fact is clear that Turkey should not become a member of the EU,” she said in an election debate with her opponent, Martin Shulz. “I'll speak to my colleagues to see if we can reach a joint position on this so that we can end these accession talks.”
The only thing surprising here is that it has taken so long, but Merkel is at last willing to effectively call a dictatorship a dictatorship now that Turkey is imprisoning German citizens, including journalists and human rights activists, and accusing them of belonging to terrorist organizations and attempting to overthrow the regime. Western countries refer to such people as “political prisoners,” and European Union states are emphatically not allowed to keep political prisoners.
The notion that Turkey might conceivably fit inside the EU has always been a bit of a stretch, and it has been especially ludicrous since last summer when a botched coup attempt triggered a Stalinist spasm in Ankara. Within just a couple of weeks, Erdogan fired more than 20,000 private school teachers and almost 10,000 police officers. He suspended nearly 3,000 judges and arrested more than 10,000 soldiers.
He canned tens of thousands of officials from the Ministry of Education and ousted 1,500 university deans. He closed more than 100 media outlets and suspended more than 1,500 officials in the Ministry of Finance. [WorldAffairsJournal.org] Read more
