“We will be able to travel to Europe without a visa within three months,” Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu famously said on April 5 as an election pledge. But that may take longer than the presidential candidate expected. German officials denied his claims to the Sabah newspaper, saying it was out of the question to remove the visas for Turkish citizens.
Kılıçdaroğlu, who is the main rival of incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said in a televised interview that they would also apply all “democratic rules” in the European Union to Türkiye. Media outlets affiliated with Kılıçdaroğlu’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) even claimed that the German government released a statement confirming the possibility of visa-free travel.
Ismail Erel of Sabah newspaper asked the German Foreign Ministry whether they could confirm the potential for visa-free travel for Turkish citizens. The ministry responded that they were unaware of the existence of such a statement. The ministry also said the removal of visas was not implemented, nor would it be implemented as Kılıçdaroğlu claimed, in three months.
Let alone a complete visa liberalization, Turkish citizens seeking even short stays in European countries faced obstacles to obtaining visas last year.
The European Union asked Türkiye to fulfill 72 criteria for visa liberalization and the country so far fulfilled 67 among them. However, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said in a recent interview that the EU was reluctant to negotiate over the fulfillment of the remaining five criteria. Çavuşoğlu said most EU countries and those outside Europe deliberately delayed approving visa applications of Turkish citizens, sometimes up to one year, under the pretext of a “backlog” of applications amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “We know it is a politically motivated move against the AK Party government. I told these to EU ambassadors earlier. If they pledged visa liberalization to Kılıçdaroğlu, it affirms that their visa slowdown is a move against our government,” Çavuşoğlu has said.
Türkiye signed a migration deal with the EU in 2016 for the readmission of migrants leaving for Europe in exchange for visa liberalization for Turkish nationals, reinvigoration of Ankara’s EU accession process, modernization of their Customs Union, cooperation in managing migration flows and improving steps in counterterrorism. Türkiye has long complained that while it upheld its end of the deal, the EU did not keep its pledges, including on visa liberalization.
