Türkiye will consider other alternatives if accession to the European Union fails, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said amid Ankara’s pursuit of a BRICS membership.
“The EU has always been our first choice, but if we cannot become a part of it, other alternatives will always be on the table,” Fidan told Bloomberg in an interview published on Monday.
Türkiye has been a candidate for EU membership for over two decades, but talks stalled in 2016 over what Ankara says is the bloc’s “insistence on politicizing the issue.”
“We have wanted to be a member of the EU for a long time, only to ensure our economic policy harmony because no country in the modern world can overcome economic and political problems on its own,” Fidan said.
“Therefore, Türkiye aims to be included in the EU's single market, but unfortunately, Europeans do not think the same way because they have managed to be a supranational civilization but not supra-civilizational. They refuse to include a major Muslim country,” Fidan said.
“In light of this reality, we have started to look at other economic platforms, other economic cooperation platforms such as BRICS, to see what kind of values they have, what their advantages are,” the minister noted.
“President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been very eager to increase Türkiye’s economic options,” he added when asked whether Ankara would join BRICS should it receive an invitation.
“Türkiye has openly expressed its interest in BRICS, but we see they have currently suspended new admissions in order to push its institutionalization to a certain point,” Fidan separately said Monday at a joint news conference with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Ankara.
Last year, Türkiye took formal steps toward full membership in the BRICS group of emerging economies, which comprises Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Ethiopia, Iran, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Ankara sees the BRICS group as an opportunity to further economic cooperation with member states rather than an alternative to its Western ties and NATO membership; Erdoğan has ruled out any possibility that its potential membership would affect Türkiye’s responsibilities to NATO.
But the trade minister announced later that BRICS offered Türkiye a “partner country” status without revealing whether Ankara had accepted the proposal.
Erdoğan, in power for over two decades, has sought to carve a more independent foreign policy for Türkiye and enhance its global influence. The country, a NATO member, has been frustrated by the lack of progress in its membership talks with the EU.
