President Nikos Christodoulides on Friday called on Turkey to fulfil its obligations so as to be able to join the European Union, as he arrived in Montenegro, the country which at present appears to be in pole position to become the first country to join the bloc since 2013.
“I am truly pleased because after several years, the Cyprus presidency has given a significant boost to candidate countries’ accession process, in particular, to Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine,” he said.
He added that preparations for Cyprus’ six-month term as the holder of the Council of the EU’s rotating presidency began when he visited Montenegro in April last year, and said to this end that “I am glad that during our presidency, we have had significant process after many years”.
“The message is clear to candidate countries that, when they meet their obligations, the EU is here to respond, and this is the message we are sending to Turkey, which continues to be a candidate country. If it fulfils its own obligations, the EU and the Republic of Cyprus are here to respond,” he said.
Turkey’s position on the matter, as the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan explained last month, is that the country’s progress towards EU membership has been “blocked” for “purely political reasons”, largely related to the Cyprus problem.
He also said that the EU has made “erroneous and unfair decisions” in relation to Turkey’s candidacy over the course of the almost seven decades since the country first applied for association with the European Economic Community in 1959.
Those decisions, he said, included “double standards” with regard to Turkey’s accession process, a lack of “sufficient support” following the attempted coup d’état in 2016, and “ignoring” the country during the 1990s as strides were made towards large-scale enlargements of the bloc.
Christodoulides was on Friday in the Montenegrin coastal town of Tivat to attend the day’s EU-Western Balkans Summit and said of the region that “the substantial progress we have seen in the accession process during the Cyprus presidency, especially in the western Balkan countries, sends a positive message”.
That positive message, he said, has been sent “to the peoples of these countries”, as well as to other actors which he said wished to “take advantage of the stagnation which has been ongoing for all this time in these states’ accession processes … and distance the region from the EU”.
“The western Balkans belong to Europe, and within this context I am particularly pleased that the Cyprus presidency, with its actions, in the continuation of the actions of the candidate states, has brought very significant results,” he said.
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