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

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.

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.