‘Unpredictable, but indispensable’
Germany reacts to the arrest of opposition leader İmamoğlu in Turkey with harmless appeals. Berlin needs Ankara’s cooperation to keep out refugees and secure strategic interests. Turkey is now a powerful player.
BERLIN/ANKARA (own report) - German politicians are reacting to the arrest of Turkish opposition politician Ekrem İmamoğlu and many of his supporters with empty words. Their inconsequential appeals are a face-saving exercise. İmamoğlu, the popular mayor of Istanbul and a potentially strong candidate for president in the next election, was arrested on Wednesday. The charges appear to be flimsy. Many of his supporters have also been arrested, while a company he owns has been expropriated. İmamoğlu’s CHP party speaks of a “an attempted coup against the potentially the next president.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that the move “weights on relations between Europe and Turkey”. No practical consequences can be expected. For Germany and the EU are dependent on cooperation with Ankara when it comes to preventing refugees from moving on to Europe, not to mention European efforts to bring Ankara into an anti-Russian alliance. Brussels is also keen to engage with Turkey as a trade and energy hub. There are, in any case, hardly any effective instruments for exerting political pressure on Turkey. On the contrary, it is Ankara that has grown in strength over recent years and secured options with alternative cooperation partners. As a leading Berlin foreign policy journal put it, Turkey is an “unpredictable, indispensable” partner.
Armaments and military
Turkey has grown considerably in strength and influence over the past two decades. This can be seen not least in the fields of arms production and military power. The Turkish defence industry has been booming in recent years. Its own production already meets 78 per cent of the Turkish armed forces’ requirements. The defence industry has become hugely successful in its export markets. Turkish arms exports were valued at 4.4 billion US dollars in 2023 and continue to expand.[1] The most successful product is the Bayraktar TB2 combat drone, which is significantly cheaper than US models and is now being sold to a large number of countries. In terms of foreign interventions, Turkey is conducting military operations in northern Syria. It first put boots on the ground in Libya several years ago and supported Azerbaijan’s army in defeating Armenia in their wars of 2020 and 2023.[2] Ankara has also deployed its navy to assert its claims against Cyprus, an EU member state, in a dispute over natural gas fields under the Mediterranean. Turkey also maintains regular military bases with thousands of soldiers in Qatar and Somalia. These bases are at strategically important locations in the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa. What is more, it still has troops stationed in northern Iraq.
Turkish-Russian rivalries
Cooperation with Turkey is seen as particularly important by the EU member states, in part due to Ankara’s contradictory relationship with Russia. On the one hand, Turkey is the only NATO member not to have joined in the sanctions regime against Russia. On the other, Ankara emphatically seeks to counter Moscow in those territories where Turkish and Russian efforts to exert influence overlap. So we see that Turkey takes part in NATO activities in the Black Sea region, which are intended to curb Russian influence there. It also supports steps “to control airspace over Romania while, in Bulgaria, Turkish troops are part of the new NATO Battlegroup, according to an article in the special Turkey-focused supplement to the latest issue of the influential journal Internationale Politik (IP).[3] Indeed, Turkey has been supplying Ukraine with Bayraktar TB2 drones. The company producing this weaponry is currently building a factory for drone production in Ukraine, and the latest Bayraktar Akıncı drone model uses Ukrainian engines. In another development hostile to Russia, Turkey is intensifying its cooperation with the Turkic-speaking states of Central Asia. While Russia traditionally regards them as countries within its close sphere of influence, Ankara is enabling some of them to take “positions independent of Russia in regional conflicts”.
Trade and energy hub
In addition to efforts to bring Ankara into the power struggle against Russia, Germany and the EU are also keen to benefit from Turkey’s role as a trading hub, especially in terms of energy distribution. Turkey’s foreign trade is booming. Trade with the Arab Gulf states alone has soared from 2.1 billion US dollars in 2002 to a volume of 22.7 billion in 2022. Turkey wants to build on this, further strengthening foreign trade and positioning itself as a “logistics hub for international value chains by means of gigantic infrastructure projects in the transport sector,” explains the IP Special.[4] In particular, Turkey is striving to “become a key location for regional energy trading”, making itself “indispensable as an energy corridor for supplying Europe with oil and natural gas from the resource-rich countries of Central Asia and the Middle East.” In addition, Turkey remains, of course, a critically important player for the EU’s push-back strategy against refugees and migrants. Turkey has the power to permit refugees from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan to pass through or to stop them as required, and it can either take back refugees who have made it to Europe or refuse to do so.[5]
Options and alternatives
Ankara’s approach to foreign policy is to keep open a variety of cooperation options, even if they may seem contradictory. For example, the Turkish government continues to express an interest in membership of the BRICS alliance. When, on 24 February, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan received his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, on the third anniversary of the Russian attack on Ukraine, he praised the BRICS for being “very inclusive”, which was “quite unlike the European Union”. Turkey was nominated as an accession candidate way back in 1999. Accession negotiations officially began in 2005, but were stalled in 2018.[6] According to the IP supplement, Turkey operates “multidimensionally and self-confidently” with all kinds of cooperation partners, “without committing itself to a specific camp.”[7] This in turn means that Germany and the EU are hardly in a position to dictate to Turkey, which has alternatives. When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the country in October 2023, observers witnessed “a shift in German policy from the normative to the pragmatic.” In fact, “Europe’s influence on Turkey had “rapidly declined,” with future negotiations likely to be conducted as “equal partners”.[8]
Harmless appeals
Dependent on cooperation with Turkey, yet having hardly any means of exerting pressure, German politicians have been muted in their response to the arrest of opposition politician Ekrem İmamoğlu and the harsh clamp-down on many of his supporters. Appeals from Berlin are intended to save face but have no consequences. The party leader of İmamoğlu’s CHP, Özgür Özel, concludes that Turkey is undergoing “an attempted coup against the next potential president”. And while thousands are still on the streets protesting, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has simply called on Ankara to show “a clear commitment to democratic norms and practices”.[9] German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke of a “very, very bad sign” that was “certainly weighing on the relationship between Europe and Turkey.” Neither Scholz nor von der Leyen even hinted at the possibility of suspending cooperation with Ankara on the questions of holding back refugees or on oil and gas imports. As the cover of the special supplement published by influential foreign policy journal ‘Internationale Politik’ put it, “Unpredictable, indispensable: Turkey as a partner”.
For more on this topic, see: Steinmeier in Ankara.
[1] Ozan Demircan: Drohnen, die sich lohnen. In: Internationale Politik Special No. 1/2025. pp. 42-47.
[2] See also: Kämpfe im Südkaukasus and ‘Wertebasierter Völkermord’.
[3] Günter Seufert: Pragmatische Partnerschaft. In: Internationale Politik Special No. 1/2025. pp. 4-11.
[4] Hürcan Aslı Aksoy: Balanceakt zwischen den Blöcken. In: Internationale Politik Special No. 1/2025. pp. 36-41.
[5] See also: Erdoğan in Berlin.
[6] Sait Burak Utucu: Türkiye’s foreign minister praises BRICS and criticizes EU at talks with Russia’s Lavrov. euronews.com 24.02.2025.
[7] Hürcan Aslı Aksoy: Balanceakt zwischen den Blöcken. In: Internationale Politik Special No. 1/2025. pp. 36-41.
[8] Günter Seufert: Pragmatische Partnerschaft. In: Internationale Politik Special No. 1/2025. pp. 4-11.
[9] Imamoglu wendet sich an Justiz: ‘Sie dürfen nicht schweigen’. deutschlandfunk.de 20.03.2025.
