While Turkish Foreign Ministry officials prefer their wax voodoo poppets in the shape of Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel's proposal to downgrade Turkey's European Union membership application into some vague form of “privileged partnership” has always rubbed Ankara diplomats just the wrong way. So her re-election as chancellor, unrestrained by her former partners, the less Turkoskeptic Social Democratic Party (SPD), might seem grim news. On reflection, however, the situation is not so bad -- or at least in the way things might at first appear.For a start, elections in Germany were not remotely about Turkey but how to cope with economic crisis. So it is interesting that Ms. Merkel managed to creep back into power, even with her hand on the economic tiller. Her grand coalition partners, the SPD, suffered more. They were punished by the electorate for being ineffectual in preventing capitalism from going bad and yet failed to claim credit for the welfare system, which helped mitigate the effect of the crisis. In a sense, the chancellor recreated the grand coalition within her own market, being both free market and a protector of the social safety net. Even then her party did not do well. Its 33 percent of the vote is the Christian Democratic Union's (CDU) worst performance in 50 years. The party that has been most antagonistic to Turkey's entry, the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), did even worse. Getting only 42 percent of the vote in Germany's conservative heartland has been described in the German press as a fiasco.
As the Turkish prime minister considers his own fortunes -- whether to go for his full term until 2011 or attempt an early poll in late 2010 -- he might take some comfort from the fact that it is possible for an incumbent party to weather economic crisis. Although Turkish politics is often shuttered from the political winds that blow from Europe, Mr. Erdogan will take careful note that even in a time of rising unemployment, the electorate can turn right as well as left. At the same time, he will not be looking for a greater confrontation with European leaders.
There is a danger, of course, that the German right, particularly the CSU, may be even more strident in its attempts to exclude Turkey from the EU. However, there is no evidence that this will work. Those who fled the CDU/CSU supported the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) instead. The liberals will replace the SPD in the coalition, and their leader, Guido Westerwelle, will almost certainly take on the job of foreign minister.
Mr. Westerwelle has been to Turkey, but stuck during the election campaign to his criticism of the country's economic management, steering clear of foreign affairs pretty much altogether. It has been 11 years since the liberals were in coalition. In 2005 they scored 9.8 percent of the vote; this time they received 14.6 percent. They are perceived of as net winners of Sunday's election, and for the moment, the initiative lies with them. Although aggressively free market, they are also vocal defenders of individual rights. Mr. Westerwelle is quietly but openly gay, which in German political terms makes it almost impossible for him to woo an anti-minority, anti-immigrant vote. Two other parties, the Greens and the former communist Left Party, also upped their vote.
In some interviews before the election, Mr. Westerwelle said he basically approved of Chancellor Merkel's foreign policy stance. Yet at the end of the day, the FDP has no truck with Merkel's privileged partnership, according to Jörg Dehnert, who heads the liberal-supported Friedrich Neumann Stiftung in İstanbul. Even to speak of such a partnership is to give it a credence it does not deserve, he says. The FDP takes Turkey at its word and believes that negotiations should proceed as promised. “Fulfill the criteria, and you get in.”
This, of course, may make Ankara shudder more than being confronted with an openly hostile Auswärtiges Amt. Imagine a Europe which expects Turkey to get on with the job of keeping its word and sticking to a timetable of reform.
