Gottfried Curio
Border Defense
AfD Kompakt, April 15, 2020
[Gottfried Curio is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Berlin. He is a physicist and musician and is the AfD’s Bundestag spokesman for interior policy.]
What the AfD delegation has predicted and of which it has warned, has now happened: Erdogan has discerned that the EU and Germany are susceptible to extortion and now, with previously acknowledged methods, renews efforts to compel yet more advantage. Instead of acquiescing to Erdogan’s last extortion effort, the money could have been used for a thoroughly effective border defense. This would have a priori taken from Erdogan the leverage which, after all, has made possible the placing of demands upon the EU. The German government, on the other hand, naturally does not wish to displease anyone who reliably sluices additional illegal immigration into the EU and thereby de facto into Germany. Thus, the angst before the voters linked to him in Germany already for long is allowed to determine German policy.
Obviously, Erdogan regards solely the tactical advantages of his procedures: Either migrants unwanted in Turkey are transported to Europe or concessions, material and immaterial (visa freedom, EU accession negotiations) are compelled. He need not reckon with the negative consequences for the European states which hitherto, without complaint, have allowed themselves to be tyrannized. Properly targeted economic sanctions (i.e., exclusion from payments transfer) which might drive the economic costs to Turkey to a level at which extortion may no longer appear to pay, appear not to frighten him.
Just as properly against the demands in the councils of the southern European EU countries for a debt mutualization (besides Target 2, a bank union, EZB loan purchases and now EU unemployment insurance and the alienation of the purpose of the ESM, the so-called reconstruction aids), so also ought not the Federal government give way against Erdogan; yet instead, it is ever again the settlement of crises by means of the robbing of German taxpayers. This policy of the eternal, fair weather trade is counter to German interests. Germany must not allow itself to be the defenseless milch cow for the Corona costs of other countries, nor allow itself ever again to be lead by the nose around the circus ring by Erdogan.
[Translated by Todd Martin]
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