Or Erdogan ?

Turkey is not part of the EU yet. I don't see how exactly the power "sits with Erdoğan".

Well, I heard people say he controls the flow of the "refugees", so he gets to make some decisions.

He can (and does) use that for leverage, but then, so could Italy, Spain, and Greece. I don't think he can get into the EU under threat of letting refugees through though, not while there's violations of human rights and such still going on in his country.

Not part or ever will be it seems. Their application officially just recently being moved to the out tray.

Turkey also won't be part of the EU. Both Merkel and her contestant for the current election stated on Sunday, that they have had enough and want to abort the negotiations about Turkey joining.

Even if they didn't abort, recent developments in Turkey have moved them significantly further away from meeting requirements for entry .

Just because we're hitting a bump along the road doesn't mean they won't join eventually. And I hope they do, they belong in the Union with us.

Erdogan controls a massive amount of refugees. Moreover, there's one or two pipelines crossing Turkey and I'm sure that helps to control things a bit too.

Of course I'm no politician, I've no access to confidential information, but I'm sure he might use that to influence Europe (and there's nothing wrong with that, that's international politics as usual).

Erdogan and the whole European east (Greece, Bulgaria, Ukraine) expansion was always just a big part of the anti-European strategy to binge grow this polit-amobea to death. And it has worked, in so far that it has accelerated the probable demise forward by at least twenty years.

Europe was always just a half hearted dream by its elites, who where not even enough into this vision, to share their power with the institutions they created. Now after the very same dream, has allowed for the life-standard growth of most of its citizens to disappear - they are in for a rude wake up with extremists devouring the corpse.

Literally nothing you're saying makes any sense on any level. This looks more like markov-chain generated text.

There is some truth in the idea that the growth of the EU was intended to slow down the process of federalization. The UK pushed hard for the growth in the 2000's and was also a proponent of Turkey joining for these reasons.

What about over-stretching a expansionist movement as a counter strategy does not make sense?

Europe has grown hard, not smart. It never evaluated what it integrated, and as a result, is more unstable then ever.

> Now after the very same dream, has allowed for the life-standard growth of most of its citizens to disappear - they are in for a rude wake up with extremists devouring the corpse.

What are you even talking about? We just had an Australian guest, who drove freely through Europe using one currency. These states previously fought two world wars against each other.

France nearly voted nationalist last vote. All of eastern europe is basically slowly abandoning democracy and demolishing its institutions. Germany is in for a AFD government.

Sorry, but drive through tourism does not paint a accurate picture.

> Germany is in for a AFD government.

It is very much not. That's just plain false. Right-wing governments have been elected everywhere (US, Australia etc.). I don't deny that the EU has played a role, but you are painting a very dark picture of an institution which has a primarily positive influence on the world.

If 35% to 66% is "nearly" getting "nationalist vote" then yeah. You can also say that despite a huge economic recession, the unexpected influx of a large population of war refugees and on the back of Brexit, the populist far-right only got half of the votes the elected party got in the end and that's actually comforting, because scaring people off is always easier than vision and reform planification.