Before dawn on 14 October, Turkish police entered the Istanbul headquarters of Halk TV, the country’s most-watched news channel and one of the few major broadcasters still critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A court had placed companies linked to the channel’s owner, Cafer Mahiroğlu, under the control of the state Savings Deposit Insurance Fund as part of an investigation into alleged bribery, bid rigging and money laundering. Live broadcasting stopped. Eleven people were detained. The operation came hours before defence arguments were due to begin in the mass corruption trial of jailed Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the opposition’s most prominent figure.
The European response followed a familiar pattern. Press freedom organisations condemned the takeover. The Council of Europe’s monitoring rapporteurs for Turkey called it a truly dark day for media freedom. Individual members of the European Parliament urged the Commission to act, though, as observers noted, no collective EU position emerged. Ankara, for its part, has little reason to expect consequences.
The muted reaction is often explained as European hypocrisy or fatigue. A more precise explanation is structural. Over the past two years, the terms on which Europe engages Turkey have shifted. The conditions that now govern Ankara’s access to Europe’s most consequential new frameworks are territorial, not democratic. Halk TV falls outside the bargain that actually matters.
The bargain that matters now
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For two decades, Europe’s leverage over Turkish domestic politics ran through the accession process, in which media freedom, judicial independence and the rule of law were formal conditions of progress. That process has been frozen for years. Its successor, in practice, is defence and security cooperation, and here the logic is entirely different.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the growing uncertainty over American commitments, Turkey’s value to European security has risen sharply. It fields NATO’s second-largest army, controls access to the Black Sea under the Montreux Convention, and has built a defence industry whose drones and armoured vehicles are combat-tested and export-competitive. Europe has responded accordingly. In July, Ankara hosted the NATO summit at Erdoğan’s presidential complex, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz had already used an October 2025 visit to Ankara to argue that the two countries should make far better use of the potential in their relationship, despite rights groups urging him to raise the crackdown on the opposition.
The clearest test case is SAFE, the EU’s €150 billion defence procurement instrument, which allows certain non-EU partners to participate. Turkey asked to join in 2025. It remains excluded, while Canada, a non-European ally, has already signed up. But the reason for Turkey’s exclusion is revealing. It is not Halk TV, nor the İmamoğlu prosecution, nor the trustees appointed to opposition-run municipalities. It is the veto of Greece and Cyprus, grounded in the Turkish parliament’s 1995 declaration that any extension of Greek territorial waters would be a cause for war. As Cyprus’s president put it, countries that threaten member states cannot access EU defence funding.
That is a legitimate position, and Athens and Nicosia have good reasons for holding it. But its implication is striking. The barrier between Turkey and Europe’s defence architecture is a maritime dispute in the Aegean and the unresolved status of Cyprus. Were Ankara to withdraw the casus belli tomorrow, the most significant obstacle to its participation would fall away, regardless of what had happened to Halk TV the week before.
Meanwhile, much of Europe’s defence engagement with Turkey is bypassing the EU frameworks where even the Greek and Cypriot vetoes apply. In October 2025, Britain signed a deal worth up to £8 billion to supply Turkey with 20 Eurofighter Typhoons, after more than two years in which Germany had held up the sale partly over human rights concerns. Berlin’s objection was dropped, not satisfied. The deal runs through a four-nation consortium and through a lead seller that sits outside the EU entirely. Bilateral industrial partnerships, joint ventures and procurement agreements between Turkish firms and individual European states proceed on their own commercial and strategic logic. The deepest layer of the relationship is being built through channels that carry no political conditionality of any kind.
Conditionality outsourced
This has two consequences that Europe has not fully confronted. The first is that the EU’s Turkey policy is now effectively set by the vetoes of two member states with specific bilateral grievances, rather than by any collective assessment of what kind of partner Turkey is becoming. Democratic conditionality has not been formally abandoned; it survives in the accession framework that no one expects to revive, and in the reports and resolutions that follow each new crackdown. But it has been detached from the instruments that carry real weight.
The second consequence concerns what Europe signals to Ankara. Turkish policymakers are well placed to read the incentives. If access to European defence funding and industrial partnerships depends on managing Greece and Cyprus rather than on domestic political liberalisation, then repression at home carries little cost in the relationship that matters most. The Halk TV takeover is not an isolated act. By the count of the Turkish outlet Bianet, it is the tenth television channel placed under the state deposit insurance fund since March 2025, a tally that includes six channels swept up in a single holding-company investigation. Reuters, counting only major news outlets, described Halk TV as the fifth to receive a trustee, after Flash TV, EkoTürk, Habertürk and Tele1. The direction of travel has been consistent, and it has coincided with Turkey’s rising strategic value rather than being constrained by it.
Even the European institution with a formal enforcement mechanism has struggled to make it bite. Turkey remains in breach of European Court of Human Rights judgments ordering the release of the civil society figure Osman Kavala, despite the Council of Europe having launched rarely used infringement proceedings against Ankara in 2022. And from 9 November Turkey hosts the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, an exercise in international standing that no European government has suggested should be affected by events at home. The lesson Ankara draws is not that Europe has stopped caring about democratic standards, but that Europe has stopped attaching them to anything Turkey wants.
The realist case, and its limit
There is a serious argument for Europe’s approach, and it deserves to be stated plainly. Europe cannot afford to choose its security partners on the basis of their domestic politics while facing a revisionist Russia and an unreliable Washington. Turkey’s contribution to Black Sea security, to NATO’s southern flank and potentially to European defence production is real. Conditioning that cooperation on media freedom would likely achieve nothing in Ankara while weakening Europe’s own position. Interests, on this view, must come first.
The limit of that argument is that it treats Turkey’s domestic trajectory as irrelevant to its reliability as a partner, and the record suggests otherwise. The concentration of power in Ankara has made Turkish foreign policy more personalised and more transactional, as Europe learned during the S-400 purchase, the repeated delays to Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO accessions and the periodic use of migration as leverage. A partner whose institutions are being hollowed out is a partner whose commitments depend increasingly on one man’s calculations. Building European defence-industrial dependencies on such a partner without any expectation of institutional constraint is not realism; it is a bet on the stability of a political system Europe can see becoming less stable.
A more honest bargain
Europe does not need to restore an accession-era conditionality it cannot enforce. It does need to be honest with itself about what it is trading. A more coherent approach would treat democratic backsliding as a risk factor in defence-industrial planning, in the same way it now treats supply-chain exposure to China: something that shapes the depth of integration, the sensitivity of the technologies shared and the safeguards built into long-term contracts. That is not a moral position; it is risk management.
It would also mean developing a collective EU view of the Turkey relationship that does not reduce to the sum of Greek and Cypriot vetoes. Those vetoes protect genuine interests, but they are not a strategy, and a Europe that relies on them to manage its most important neighbour has effectively stopped making Turkey policy at all.
Halk TV’s screens went dark on the day the opposition’s leading figure began his defence in court. Europe noticed, issued its statements and moved on, because nothing in its current bargain with Ankara required it to do more. That, rather than any single act of repression, is the development worth watching.
