Poll shows low support for Turkey

By David Cronin

Date: 08/09/05

Just weeks before Turkey is scheduled to start accession negotiations with the EU, on 3 October, an opinion poll shows that popular support for Turkey's membership averages 22% in nine EU states.

The survey, carried out for the German Marshall Fund of the US, shows that support is as low as 11% in France, where a referendum on Turkish membership has been promised by Jacques Chirac's government.

A wider poll by the European Commission earlier this year put Turkey's approval rating at 35%.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey would abandon its efforts to join the EU if its member states require it to fulfil further criteria.

Visiting Italy last weekend, Erdogan voiced optimism that accession talks would begin as scheduled. But he said it would "not be the end of the world" if Turkey was kept out of the EU by being faced with entry conditions additional to the 1993 criteria signed by EU leaders in Copenhagen.

The Cypriot government, along with France and Greece, has been demanding that Turkey formally recognise Cyprus before talks can commence.

During a meeting of foreign ministers in Newport, Wales, last Friday (2 September), the British minister chairing the talks sought to downplay the impression of a divided Union. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he was "reasonably confident" that negotiations would kick off in October but "there are some matters that need to be dealt with to achieve that".

Straw was responding to a reporter's question asking if Turkey needed to open its ports and airports to aircraft from the Greek Cypriot south of the island within the next month.

Article reports on recent polls by the German Marshall Fund and the European Commission on popular support for Turkey's accession across the EU 's Member States. Both polls showed very low levels of support.