Strasbourg, 16/09/2004 (Agence Europe) - If the European Commission recommends on 6 October that accession negotiations be opened with Turkey, they will be opened, but if "in year x the two parties recognise that things are not going as they thought, they should be able to recognise this in agreement with each other", said Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker on Wednesday night in Strasbourg in front of a small group of journalists after a meeting with the German PPE-DE MEPs. This means that "all options must be kept open", he explained. The negotiations with last "considerably longer" than all the other accession negotiations, he said, warning: "there will be no fast-track accession for Turkey". Their accession is "a long way off", said Mr Juncker. When asked "when?", he replied: I cannot answer that question because we do not really know the magnitude of the problems to be dealt with and more particularly, we do not know how the Turkish economy will develop in the next ten to fifteen years. What about the alternative of a privileged partnership, proposed by the CDU? It's an interesting idea, but we already have a customs union with Turkey, so, in practical terms, "everything bar the institutions", commented Mr Juncker. He also warned: above all, there is the 1999 decision (of Helsinki) on the recognition of Turkey's candidate-status, and we must "respect Turkey as a discussion-partner".
Jean-Claude Juncker recalled that, at the European Council of 1997 in Luxembourg, he had opposed awarding candidate-status to Turkey. I said that "any country using systematic torture has no place at the EU table", and Turkey was very "angry", Mr Juncker remembered, adding: at the time, in the streets of Turkey even the children knew my name, and people said "it all failed because of Juncker", but in the EU there was no debate. Why, after 1997, did we not open a thorough debate on Turkey's accession?, asked Mr Juncker. And, noting that in 1999 it seemed that everybody wanted to give Ankara candidate-status for accession without such a debate taking place, he asked: why are we only having this kind of in-depth debate now?