Le Monde: France to Propose a One-Year Postponement

"Paris might tell Ankara to start only the pre-negotiation process in December 2004 and to deal with the issue in detail one year later," it said yesterday (October 26).

The French President, Jacques Chirac reportedly planned to remove the risks from a referendum on the Constitution in France with the help of this formula.

Erdogan: French mood has disappointed Turkish people

Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave an interview to the British newspaper The Guardian saying that the popular mood in France and Germany which strongly opposed the start of membership negotiations with Turkey was hurting Turkish people.

Erdogan commented that the European prejudice against Turkey was because Turkey was not properly understood and pointed out that France already has $5.5 billion invested in Turkey.

"You can see the French influence even in our architecture and our vocabulary is full of words of French origin," he said. "I think European prejudices are because of a lack of understanding of Turkey."

The Turkish Prime Minister saying that the government had not taken a break in the last two years "even for a second" in adopting EU laws, disclosed that Turkish people were disappointed because Turkey’s EU accession process was tied up with the French referendum "until some day in the future".