French President Emmanuel Macron considers it necessary to step up strategic cooperation between the EU and Russia and Turkey, he said on Monday in his speech at the annual ambassadors’ meeting devoted to Paris’ international activity.
"We cannot build and develop Europe in a long-term prospect without revisiting our relations with Russia and Turkey. This study of relations should be carried out without any condescension or naivete," the state leader said.
"Can we sensibly and sincerely presume today that further talks about Turkey’s accession to the EU are possible if the Turkish president [Tayyip Erdogan,] with whom I had unusually intensive contacts throughout more than a year, is promoting the pan-European project that is constantly being presented as anti-European? That is, the measures that he regularly takes contradict our principles in fact. In this case we have to abandon the biased approach in order to develop a truly effective solution that would correspond to our position," the French president noted.
Paris should develop strategic partnership that would stipulate membership in the European Union, he said. "We’ve got to develop conditions for strategic partnership with both Russia and Turkey, because these are the two states that are needed to [provide] our collective security," Macron stressed.
He noted that "these countries should be ‘linked’ to Europe." "Because the history of the peoples of these countries evolved jointly with Europe’s history. And we have to build our future together," the French leader noted.
"That is, we have to work out new solutions on a demand basis on all issues, but without the uncertain bureaucratic poking which we are so used to resorting in the specified case. We overcame the Cold War era and President Erdogan’s Turkey is not President Kemal’s Turkey. These are the two realities, and we need to draw the necessary conclusions from it," the French president said.
