All talk and no action: The EU is still fond of Erdoğan

It came out that Brussels has not turned off the fountain of money to Ankara despite the crisis between the European Union and Erdoğan regime, with reports suggesting that the EU has paid a further 23 million Euros to the AKP regime since March 2017.

Repercussions of the German state's sanctions on Turkey's Erdoğan regime following the imprisonment by Turkey of human rights defender Peter Steudtner of Germany last week, continue. Peter Steudtner has been the 22nd German citizen to be detained after the July 15 coup attempt of last year and 9 German citizens are in Turkish prisons as of now.

The sanctions announced by German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel are “EU funds”, “travel warning” and “reconsidering credit guarantees”. Yet, it came out that the European Union's financial support for Ankara did not halt despite the crisis between the EU and the AKP regime.

Tensions between the European states and the Erdoğan regime hit the peak following the repeated bans imposed on the events and rallies the AKP sought to hold across Europe for 16 April's referendum. Despite the fact that Erdoğan accused Europe of Nazi practices, the EU has not halted the financial aid for Turkey.

According to the German daily Bild, since March, the EU has paid Turkey a further € 23 million of pre-accession aid despite the fact that there have been a lot of calls for the payments to be stopped. With this, the amount Turkey has received from the EU up to today has reached 190.2 million Euros, while this figure was 167.3 million Euros by the end of March.

According to the Bild report, a total of 4.45 billion Euros has been earmarked for Turkey's EU accession till 2020, and EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn confirmed the recent payments.

Brussels has granted Ankara a total of €3 billion during the past three years for the sake of both pre-accession and the refugee deal. 3.3 billion Euros of this amount had been paid only between 2014 and 2016, bringing Turkey to the top of the list of countries benefiting from EU aid.