Turkey’s president had a bad NATO summit, too

TURKEY’S president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spent the early part of this year repeatedly insulting his NATO allies, partly with the aim of stimulating nationalist sentiment at home in order to win a constitutional referendum giving him nearly autocratic powers. He won that referendum in April, and has since been trying to repair his damaged ties with the West. But as the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25th showed, the charm offensive is not going very well.

At the summit, Emmanuel Macron, France's newly elected president, pressed Mr Erdogan to release a French photographer held for more than two weeks in a Turkish deportation centre. Germany's Angela Merkel, whose government Mr Erdogan accused of Nazi practices in the run-up to the referendum, complained to him about the arrest of a German reporter three months ago. Mrs Merkel also insisted that Turkey allow German MPs to visit Incirlik airbase, where 250 of her country's troops are stationed. (Turkey has refused to do so since the Bundestag passed a resolution recognising the Ottoman massacres of Armenians during the first world war as genocide.) Mrs Merkel threatened to withdraw the German forces if the block is not lifted.