Royal gives her support to Turkey's bid for EU accession

By Delphine Strauss in Paris

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

"In the end, Turkey has a vocation to join Europe, provided 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 yesterday.

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 frontrunner 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 that stance.

Opinion polls show most 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 distrust of Turkey's record on human rights, fuelled by France's 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 jibe at the UK's backing for Ankara, she said: "Who today are the warmest supporters of maximum enlargement? Those who reduce Europe to a big market with the least regulation possible."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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