Royal gives backing to Ankara’s EU bid
By Delphine Strauss in Paris

FT
March 25 2007 19:31

Ségolène Royal has declared her support for Turkey’s bid
to join the European Union, becoming the only main contender in
France’s forthcoming presidential election to endorse an enlargement
deeply unpopular with voters.

`In the end, Turkey has a vocation to join Europe, provided that it
satisfies the membership criteria, which are not just economic and
financial but also democratic,’ the Socialist party candidate said in
a new book, extracts of which were published by Le Monde on Sunday.

Her support offers a glimmer of hope to Turkey’s troubled bid for EU
membership which, even if it clears all technical hurdles, depends on
the outcome of a French referendum promised by President Jacques
Chirac in 2004 as a condition for opening negotiations.

Ms Royal added strong qualifications, saying Europe first needed a
pause to stabilise its borders and `prove its concrete utility in the
daily life of those it already unites’.

Yet her position is sharply at odds with all other leading
presidential contenders. Nicolas Sarkozy, candidate of the
centre-right UMP and front-runner in the opinion polls, has repeatedly
insisted that `Turkey’s place is not in the EU’. François
Bayrou, the europhile centrist, has echoed that opposition, arguing
that Ankara’s membership would end the dream of EU political unity.

`We should not make an argument of geography against Turkey: Europe is
not a territory…but a political project,’ Ms Royal
said. She argued Europe would gain from a show of unity between
civilisations, while the prospect of EU entry would assist Turkish
democrats in enacting reforms and `also help them in their combat
against this state negationism that is the refusal to recognise the
Armenian genocide’.

Ms Royal has previously been pilloried for refusing to state an
opinion on Turkey, saying her position would be `that of the French
people’. But now she appears to be taking risks in departing from her
noncommittal stance.

Opinion polls show a majority of French voters oppose Turkish
membership. Many feel previous enlargements of the EU have reduced
Paris’s influence and economic edge in Europe, and there is also
widespread distrust of Turkey’s record on human rights, fuelled by
France’s wealthy, 450,000-strong Armenian community

The French National Assembly enraged Ankara last year by voting for
legislation that, if enacted, would make it a crime to deny that
Armenians were the victims of genocide in the last years of the
Ottoman Empire. Armenians say as many as 1.5m people died in
1915-1918, while Turkey says that hundreds of thousands of both
Armenians and Turks died, largely as a result of civil war and famine.

Ms Royal, who wants to revive French enthusiasm for Europe by pressing
for minimum social standards, said her reasons for delaying Turkish
membership related `not to Turkey but to Europe’. In a clear jibe at
the UK’s sponsorship of Turkish membership, she said: `Who today are
the warmest supporters of maximum enlargement? Those who reduce Europe
to a big market with the least regulation possible…’