Poland will skip no touchy topics in talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting Warsaw on October 17, the office of President Andrzej Duda said ahead of the visit by the Turkish leader, whose crackdown on opposition and media has made him unwelcome in most European countries.
Erdogan comes to Poland to meet Duda and discuss cooperation within Nato and the relationships of Turkey with the EU. Both Nato and, in particular, the EU have seen their ties with Turkey come under severe test following Erdogan’s tightening of power at the expense of democratic freedoms. Ankara’s accession talks with the EU are de facto frozen.
Warsaw also has an increasingly strained relationship with the EU, most recently because of the government’s plans to reform the judiciary. While these plans are nothing like the sort of authoritarian measures Erdogan has perpetrated in Turkey, the two countries are seen as having some common ground as European outsiders.
“There will be no taboo topics,” when Duda and Erdogan meet, the presidential minister Krzysztof Szczerski vowed in a statement ahead of the meeting. Szczerski added that the two heads of state will discuss “the internal situation” in Turkey.
Since Erdogan foiled an alleged coup attempt in 2016, he has undertaken a massive crackdown on opposition. “In the aftermath, the [Erdogan] government declared a state of emergency, jailed thousands of soldiers and embarked on a wholesale purge of public officials, police, teachers, judges, and prosecutors,” Human Rights Watch said in a report earlier this year.
Erdogan will also meet the Prime Minister Beata Szydlo to talk economic cooperation as well as security and Turkey’s relationships with the EU.
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