Brussels, 28/02/2011 (Agence Europe) - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has postponed his visit to Brussels on Tuesday 1 March, where he was due to meet President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso to discuss new impetus for his country's EU accession talks. Erdogan will be attending the funeral on Tuesday of former Turkish prime minister and founder of modern Islamism Necmettin Erbakan, who died on 27 February at the age of 85. The Commission hopes the meeting can be rescheduled later this week and Turkey says the meeting will take place in the next few weeks.
The main subject of the talks with Barroso will be Turkey's accession negotiations, which ground to a virtual standstill many months ago. In five years, Turkey has only opened 13 of the 35 negotiating chapters and has one chapter provisionally closed. Under the Belgian Presidency in the second half of 2010, no new chapters were opened and prospects are little better for the first half of this year. The Hungarian Presidency of the EU is “not in a position to forecast any accession conference with Turkey” before the end of June, explain well-informed sources. For political reasons - eight chapters suspended because of Turkey's failure to apply the Ankara Protocol and several chapter blocked by Cyprus and France - only three areas are currently negotiable, namely competition; public tenders; and social policy and employment. Technical work is currently focusing on competition (experts met in Ankara last week) but Turkey is still far from meeting the opening benchmarks in this particularly complex domain.
In addition to the technical difficulties, there is a tense political backdrop due to Turkey's relations with France and Germany - the two main backers of “privileged partnership” for Turkey rather than allowing the country to join the EU. Erdogan was in Germany on Sunday 27 and Monday 28 February, where he criticised “xenophobic” tendencies in Germany and criticised Angela Merkel's government after a meeting with Merkel in Berlin on Monday of discriminating against the large number of Turks living in Germany. He called on Germany to return to being the engine of Turkey's accession talks “as used to be the case with older CDU governments”, particularly under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Erdogan added: “Obviously, developments in the accession process up till now give the impression of discrimination.” On an official visit to Ankara on 25 February 2011 to prepare for the G20 summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy repeated his opposition to Turkey joining the EU, explaining that there was a balance to be struck between full accession and association, a balance that would neither destabilise Europe nor humiliate Turkey. In an atmosphere of hostility, Erdogan said that France's attitude to Turkey was “totally wrong” and if things continued like that, then people should take a decision and say “We don't want Turkey in Europe”, he told the French president. (H.B./transl.fl)