Germany’s chancellor reached out to Ankara during a two-day visit to Turkey this week, but stood firm on her opposition to Turkish membership of the European Union.

On her first visit to Ankara in four years, Chancellor Angela Merkel, accompanied by a large delegation of German businesspeople, sought to smooth over recent tensions concerning Turkish schools in Germany and EU membership for Turkey. Coming on the heels of a harsh verbal exchange between the two leaders, analysts were expecting a tense visit.

But while Chancellor Merkel’s tone was friendly, her stance on EU membership remained essentially the same. Just days earlier, Ankara had rejected Germany’s proposal of a “privileged partnership” with the EU. Merkel adjusted the wording slightly and offered an “open-ended process.”

Nevertheless, at a joint press conference after a meeting with Chancellor Merkel on Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that steps had been taken to develop a strategic partnership between Germany and Turkey. Both leaders talked of developing bilateral cooperation in various fields.

Germany is one of Turkey’s main economic partners, with trade between the two amounting to almost €25 billion (us$36 billion) in 2008. More than 4,000 German companies do business in Turkey.

Turkey has been seeking membership of the EU since 1987 and has been continually rebuffed by Germany and France in particular.

As the Wall Street Journal remarked on Tuesday, in pushing for full membership of the EU, Prime Minister Erdogan “is wasting his time.” Chancellor Merkel knows, it wrote, “that, if her countryfolk were livid at the prospect of their cash being used to bail out profligate Greece, they would be positively incandescent were she to soften her stance on Turkey. …

“The reason isn’t Turkey’s long-running squabble over Cyprus, although its refusal to open its ports and airspace to EU member Cyprus provides useful tactical cover for those opposed to full EU membership for Turkey. Neither is it the need for Turkey to speed up its political reforms. It is Turkey’s overwhelming embrace of Islam which is the real, but unspoken, issue. With a population of 72.5 million, Turkey would be second only to Germany in scale if it were to join the EU. Although the government of the country is secular, estimates put the proportion of the population which is Muslim at around 99 percent” (emphasis ours).

A recent German-based pan-European study on attitudes to migrants and prejudice found that Germans in particular believe that German and Turkish cultures are incompatible. “Only 16.6 percent of Germans in 2008 agreed that Muslim culture fits well into Germany,” Andreas Zick, an expert on migration and prejudice at the University of Bielefeld and lead author of the study, told Deutsche Welle.

This is consistent with what theTrumpet.com has previously pointed out. A July 9, 2008, article stated, for example:

Yes, to Europeans, Turkey’s EU bid is dead.The fundamentally Roman Catholic continent simply has no intention of ever incorporating 70 million Muslims in one swoop. And Turkey—with its Ottoman history, which at one time threatened Catholicism’s very existence—has particularly negative associations in European minds.Still, given this nation’s strategic value to Europe, you just watch. Somehow, some way, the EU will continue to dangle carrots in front of Turkey in order to continue to benefit from doing business with it.

This is precisely what Chancellor Merkel’s trip this week to Turkey represented.

To understand how Turkey’s status as a perpetual outsider from Europe fits the biblical outline of prophecy, read our article “Why Turkey Matters.”