The Irish Times
October 26, 2006 Thursday

Enthusiasm for EU now collapsing in Turkey

by Jamie Smyth in Brussels

EU: Support for joining the EU in Turkey has collapsed amid growing
public disillusionment over the slow pace of accession talks with
Brussels.

Less than a third of Turks, some 32.2 per cent, now think Turkey must
join the union, according to a survey carried out by pollsters A&G
and published in Turkey’s Milliyet newspaper yesterday. A similar
poll last year found 57.4 per cent of people thought Turkey "must
certainly enter the EU". In 2004 the figure was 67.5 per cent.

The opinion poll comes at a sensitive time for EU-Turkey relations as
Brussels pushes hard for more political and legal reform ahead of a
crucial monitoring report on Turkey to be published on November 8th.
Ankara also faces pressure to open its ports and airports to vessels
from Cyprus.

A quarter of the 2,408 people surveyed in the poll said Turkey
"should certainly not enter the EU", a steep rise on the 10.3 per
cent who felt that way last year, when Ankara began accession talks.
The poll, undertaken in late September, also showed 76.5 per cent of
Turks expect tougher conditions to be imposed on them by Brussels in
the future, while only 7.2 per cent now trust the EU.

Political analysts speculated that the poll results could make it
tougher for prime minister Tayyip Erdogan, who faces a general
election in November 2007, to push through unpopular reforms demanded
by the EU.

The slump in Turkish support for accession follows criticism by
Brussels of Ankara’s reform programme, particularly its failure to
boost freedom of expression.

This month Turkish attitudes to the EU were further soured when
French parliamentarians introduced a Bill making it a crime to deny,
as Ankara does, that Ottoman Turks carried out a genocide against
Armenians in 1915.