The European Union wants to re-energize its bilateral relations with Türkiye, the EU commissioner for enlargement said Monday, expressing hope for further steps in long-frozen Turkish-EU ties.
“We are actively engaged with Ankara to re-energize our bilateral relations,” Oliver Varhelyi told in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, during the Interparliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP).
“After five years, we just had a productive exchange with the Turkish Foreign Minister (Hakan Fidan) at the latest Gymnich meeting at the end of August,” he noted, expressing his hope for further high-level dialogues, gradual re-engagement of the European Investment Bank and relaunching the discussion on the mandate for the modernizations of the EU-Türkiye Customs Union.
Türkiye’s invitation to the Gymnich meetings comes after a five-year hiatus, which Ankara said it sees as “an effort to seek dialogue.” However, Türkiye expects that the “necessary will must be shown and concrete steps must be taken” to strengthen ties.
Varhelyi said, “I do hope that all this is going to be reality soon.”
Ankara’s EU membership negotiations started in 2005 but entered a stalemate after 2007 due to the Cyprus issue and political opposition to Türkiye’s membership by several member states.
During his speech, Varhelyi highlighted the EU’s enlargement policy as “a top priority” for the bloc, saying enlargement has become “inevitable” because there is no peace, prosperity or security in Europe without enlargement.
“It’s no longer the question of whether we will have enlargement. The question is when we will have enlargement,” he added, recalling that in 2019, at the beginning of the commission’s mandate, there were five candidate countries, and now there are nine.
Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Türkiye and Ukraine are nine candidate countries.
Kosovo, which is not recognized by five EU members, applied in December 2022, and is considered a potential candidate by the bloc.
