Turkish opposition lawmakers have admitted on the record that they blame Greece and Cyprus when meeting with European co...

Turkish opposition lawmakers have admitted on the record that they blame Greece and Cyprus when meeting with European counterparts, rather than raising their own government's failures. The confession came during a parliamentary hearing on October 13, before Turkey's EU Harmonization Committee, and it was unusually blunt even by Turkish political standards. CHP legislator Jale Nur Süllü laid out the practice plainly. "We don't say these things when we go abroad," she told the committee. "We always blame them, we attribute it to Cyprus, we attribute it to Greece." She acknowledged that without honest debate, Turkey would never make real progress on its EU bid. İYİ Party lawmaker Lütfü Türkkan went further, cutting through the diplomatic language entirely. "What we say abroad is not true," he said. Süllü responded that they were doing it to protect their country. The exchange happened during a session where lawmakers were grilling Deputy Foreign Minister Mehmet Kemal Bozay over Turkey's stalled EU membership bid, which has been effectively frozen for years. Süllü described the relationship as no longer a genuine accession process but a series of transactions. She pointed to the October 9 opening of a 153-kilometer railway section near the Bulgarian border, funded by 275 million euros in EU pre-accession grants, as an example of Turkey extracting benefits while resisting reforms. She also raised the case of urban planner Tayfun Kahraman, sentenced to 18 years over the 2013 Gezi Park protests. Turkey's own Constitutional Court ruled on October 6 that lower courts violated his rights, yet the ruling has not been implemented. Bozay told the committee that Turkey had complied with roughly 90 percent of European Court of Human Rights decisions, but other lawmakers pushed back, pointing to the unresolved cases of imprisoned philanthropist Osman Kavala and Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş. The admission confirms what Greek and Cypriot officials have said for years: Turkey uses both countries as a convenient deflection whenever EU partners raise concerns about democratic backsliding. #Turkey #Greece #Cyprus