Brussels, 16/12/2004 (Agence Europe) - Declarations by French president Jacques Chirac and the common position of the EPP leadership seem to have raised, before the opening of the European Council on Thursday evening, the final questions on opening accession negotiations with Turkey. Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared in the afternoon to TV5 that Turkey would have a positive attitude toward recognising the republic of Cyprus "after 17 December and also appeared prepared for a normalisation of relations. Mr Erdogan discussed at length on Thursday afternoon with Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who will be chairing the European Council meeting. Europeans were hoping that the Turkish question could be settled by dinner on Thursday evening.
The Turks appeared very relieved on Thursday after the French speech made the nigh before by president Chirac. Although the French are in the Austrian and Danish camp when it came to asking for the conclusions to explicitly include an alternative to accession and despite the opposition on the most of his party to Turkey's candidacy, Jacques Chirac clearly rejected the idea of mentioning any special partnership or other alternative. The French president informed French television that requesting, "a country like Turkey, a large country with a very long history, to make such efforts to obtain cursory or only partial results, is obviously unreasonable". The French president declared that the question that needed posing was Europe, especially France going to support the Turkish candidacy or not. He said that it should support it if Turkey fulfilled all the conditions imposed on all candidates.
European diplomats support the opening of unambiguous negotiations with Turkey and have judged the declarations of the French president as "positive" but did not exclude the possibility that discussion could be lengthy on "details of information". With the support of all the leaders of the EPP for a text that included the European Commission's almost word for word (see pp 5 in this bulletin) on 6 October, it appeared that they were getting close to accepting the Commission's formula, which outlines that the result is not guaranteed but which does not envisage alternatives to accession, "this is an open process, the result of which cannot be guarantee in advance. Independent of the result of negotiations or of the resulting ratification process, relations between the EU and Turkey have to guarantee that Turkey remains anchored to European structures".