Turkey now again “sick man of Europe” – ex-German FM
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey is again becoming “the sick man of Europe” as the Ottoman Empire was in the 19th century, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer wrote for opinion site Project Syndicate, Ahval reports.
“Given its strategic location and economic and human potential, the country should be moving toward a brilliant twenty-first-century future. Instead, it is marching backward toward the nineteenth century, under the banner of nationalism and reorientalization,” Fischer said.
“Rather than embrace Western modernity, it is throwing in its lot with the Middle East and that region’s perpetual crises.”
Erdogan had taken its place in the conflicts in the Middle East and “become part of the problem in the region,” Fischer said.
However, Turkish stability was too important to Europe to abandon the country, as the continent’s security depended on Turkey protecting it from the millions of migrants and refugees who have fled there, he said.