“We certainly have a problem and it is clear we need to be in dialogue with Turkey to solve it,” a high-level German official told me when asked about news stories that Ankara and Berlin reached an understanding to send Turkish illegal migrants back to Turkey.
“We told the Germans we are ready to work with them but we have not reached an agreement,” told me a Turkish official.
Berlin and Ankara provide different accounts on where they are to solve the problem.
The number of Turkish asylum seekers to Germany saw a sharp increase in 2023, making them the second-largest group after Syrians.
Following long negotiations, Turkey allegedly agreed to take back 500 refugees each week in return for visa facilitation, according to a news story by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). German government sources confirmed the FAZ’s story to other news outlets while German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser’s statements also appeared to suggest that the two
capitals had reached an agreement.
The spokesperson of the Turkish Foreign Ministry immediately denied the reports, saying, “No consent was given to any mass deportation of our citizens.”
Following the reaction from Ankara, the German Interior Ministry decided to remain silent,
according to the German daily Die Welt, which added that Berlin did not want to put Ankara in a difficult position.
There is no written agreement on the issue between Ankara and Berlin, yet the two sides have been working to strike a deal since the migration problem has been dominating the German agenda, in parallel with the election successes of the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD).
NEED TO FIND A FACE-SAVING FORMULA
“The problem of Turkish citizens who do not have a legal right to stay in Germany made the headlines only recently. Usually it is the Syrians and the Afghans,” a German expert told me.
There are currently 14,000 Turkish citizens whose applications for asylum have been turned down and as the internal legal process has ended within Germany, they can be deported at any moment, according to German sources.
Thousands more applications are expected to be turned down since many are believed to have left Turkey due to economic problems. This year the number of asylum seekers from
Turkey has already reached 24,000.
Berlin claims, Turkey has been dragging its feet to take them back. Ankara appears to be
uneasy in accepting mass deportations. “We told the German side we are ready to take back Tukish citizens but they need to give us a list of the ones they want to send back. We just
cannot accept whoever they send back. How do we know they won’t send back criminals they keep in prison. The ball is in their court,” said a Turkish official who asked to remain anonymous.
The two capitals need to sort out a face-saving formula before the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's visit scheduled for Oct. 13.
RELYING ON TURKEY FOR MIGRATION PROBLEM
German leaders both on the left and on the right appear to rely on Turkey help them grapple with the surge of the anti-immigration AfD.
AfD beat Scholz’s center-left SPD into second place in June’s European Parliament elections.
It then won almost a third of the vote, nine points ahead of the conservative CDU, and far in front of Germany's three governing parties during the elections held in September in two
states.
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU, was scheduled to come to Turkey on Sept. 18 to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as well as leaders of the opposition. He canceled his visit at the last minute to finalize talks with the CDU’s traditional ally CSU over his candidacy. In fact, on Sept. 17, the two conservative parties officially chose Merz as their candidate for
chancellor in next year's federal elections.
As the conservative parties lost ground to AfD, Merz wanted to come to Turkey to give the message to the German public that “He can solve the migration problem,” according to
Ceyhun Kara, a Turkish journalist who lives in Germany. “Until he became a candidate, we
never heard anything from Merz about Turkey,” Kara told me.
Both Sholz and Merz appear to follow in the steps of Angela Merkel, the previous chancellor whose decision to open the doors to Syrian refugees in 2016 sent her approval ratings into a sharp fall. Merkel rushed to Ankara and visited Turkey on five different occasions in the course of eight months which resulted in the famous Turkey- EU migration deal.
“Who would have imagined that Erdoğan would save Merkel’s career,” a German official told me in 2016, underlining the fact that the two leaders were never very fond of each other.
It is a big question mark however if visa facilitation would be enough to convince Erdoğan to accept a speedier return of Turkish citizens. Ankara expects Germany to greenlight the sale of Eurofighter jets while the decision of the German government to withhold parts required for Turkey's first nuclear power plant to be built by Russia has increased Ankara’s frustrations.
