“We Germans have to pay far more attention to Turkey. We have to recognize that the global architecture is currently changing dramatically,” Westerwelle was quoted as saying in an interview that appeared in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit on Thursday. He noted that the Germans' view of the relationship tended to be too short term.
Turkey has been an EU candidate since 1999 and opened accession negotiations in 2005 but progress has been slow since then amid objections in Europe to the accession of a predominantly Muslim country and disputes over Cyprus. The German coalition government, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is at best skeptical towards Turkish membership and several CDU politicians have said they would prefer a privileged partnership instead, a preference supported by France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.
But Westerwelle, the leader a smaller coalition party, the Free Democrats (FDP), was opposed to the privileged partnership formula, saying Turkey’s major advances have made the privileged partnership issue out of date. He also took note of the fact that the Christian Democrats have not been using the expression recently.
