Deep divisions have emerged between some major powers, such as Germany, France and Italy – which are seeking to adopt a less confrontational stance towards Moscow – and the emerging east European powers like Poland – which argue that the Continent’s long-term security requires Russia to suffer a comprehensive and unambiguous defeat on the Ukrainian battlefield. The EU’s credibility has already come under intense scrutiny over its unconvincing response to the Ukraine crisis. In such circumstances, Erdogan’s narrow election victory, in which he secured just over 52 per cent of the vote against his secularist opponent, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, means that Turkey’s EU ambitions will be unachievable for the immediate future, leaving Brussels to rue the day it ever conceived Turkish membership of the bloc could be a viable proposition.Įrdogan’s re-election to serve another five-year term, one in which he is likely to expand his autocratic tendencies at the expense of the country’s democratic institutions, certainly provides the EU with a significant challenge, one that seriously calls into question its ambitions to position itself as a soft-power superpower equal in stature to the US and China.

This, after all, is a politician who began his campaign for re-election by evoking the 1453 Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire. It is his support for the Islamist creed, one that utterly rejects the liberal freedoms espoused by the West, that makes his outlook anathema. It is not just Erdogan’s increasingly autocratic approach during his 20 years in power, with drastic curbs imposed on parliament, the judiciary and the press, that makes him a pariah. The reality, of course, is that while Erdogan is in power, Turkey has about as much chance of joining the bloc as Russia does under Vladimir Putin. Indeed, the country is still formally regarded as a candidate for accession, even though Ankara has hardly made any progress on implementing the necessary institutional reforms since 2004.Īccording to Erdogan, Turkey still covets EU membership, with the Turkish leader informing a meeting of EU ambassadors in the Turkish capital last year that EU membership “remains our strategic priority”. It was not so long ago, after all, that Brussels was trying to cajole Turkey into becoming a member of the EU. Any pretensions the European Union may entertain of being a major power in world affairs have been utterly exposed by the re-election of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as president of Turkey.

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