How curious, he said, that “somebody declares” they’ll take 40 odd thousand refugees and are then nominated for a Nobel. “We have 2.5m refugees and nobody cares at all!” he thundered with a sardonic smile.
Alas the Nobel is not in the gift of Ms Merkel and the EU; had it been, Mr Erdogan would have probably won his laurel by now. Instead he has been showered with all the other goodies the EU can muster — from political favours to promises of €3bn in cash — in Brussels’ desperate bid to find a fix to its migrant problem. And the haggling is not over.
For all the EU’s efforts to curb it, the migrant flow has only grown since the summer. Almost 900,000 have landed on Europe’s shores this year. Senior EU officials suspect Mr Erdogan, whose country is a prime transit route to Europe for migrants fleeing the Middle East, is behind the surge. Whether true or not, one despairing diplomat joked that “only God and Erdogan” can now deliver relief.
An ambitious deal is in the works. There were rocky moments in the negotiations but a Turkey-EU deal will probably be signed at a special summit next Sunday — a finale to Europe’s most ardent courtship of a Turkish leader in the post-Ottoman era. “This is what comes of political panic. We went to him on our knees,” says Marc Pierini, a former EU ambassador to Turkey, “and now he is playing us.”
That was evident when Mr Erdogan met Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president, last week. What Mr Juncker called a “sportive” exchange involved Mr Erdogan belittling the Luxembourger as the former premier “of a country the size of a Turkish city”. No world leader has shown such disdain for a commission president except Vladimir Putin during his run-ins with José Manuel Barroso.
This has given pause to those in Brussels and Berlin, who earlier this month were wishing Mr Erdogan’s party electoral success. They aided his cause with mid-campaign summits in Brussels, visits by Ms Merkel and the convenient delay of critical reports on Turkey’s “progress” toward EU membership. Shoved aside were fears over media crackdowns, an allegedly autocratic drift, or the flare-up in violence with Kurdish separatists. The migration issue trumped all others.
European officials say they are paying a fair price for a genuinely ambitious migration deal. Within months, millions of Syrians may enjoy greater work and education rights in Turkey, border controls may be tightened, and within a year a fully implemented “readmission” deal may allow the bloc to send back thousands of irregular migrants crossing from Turkey. Should it work, Turkey will essentially become Europe’s migrant buffer zone.
In Turkey, officials bristle at the idea of being “bought off”. Mr Erdogan views this as more than a transaction: He wants political parity. It is not so much the €3bn over two years as the principle of cost-sharing, of holding regular summits, of respecting Turkey sufficiently to unfreeze membership talks and grant its citizens visa rights.
One irony is that Brussels’ sudden flexibility has reinforced Mr Erdogan’s view that EU legalism has been merely a charade to cover its anti-Turkish prejudice. Turkey, he claims, is in better economic and legal shape than “most EU members”. If Turkey is so important for EU security and stability, he asks, “why don’t they just let us join?”
For all the expectations, the deal still faces obvious dangers. The EU is divided and is struggling to deliver the money — let alone overcome a longstanding Cypriot block on accession talks. Giving 75m Turks visa-free access to Schengen may now be impossible after the Paris attacks.
Still, optimists are heartened that the EU is at last investing in badly neglected relations with Ankara. Talks on unifying Cyprus are also raising hopes of solving a fiendishly intractable dispute in which Turkey is a significant player.
If Brussels and Ankara can achieve deals on both Cyprus and refugees, “we can talk about a new European spring in Turkey” that might help foster democracy, says Sinan Ulgen, a scholar at Carnegie Europe. And that really would deserve a Nobel Prize.