The European Parliament voted on 17 June to keep Türkiye's EU membership bid where it has sat for eight years: frozen. The count was 381 in favor, 107 against, and 171 abstentions. Ankara rejected the whole thing before the day was out.
The text is the Parliament's annual report on Türkiye, drafted this cycle by Spanish rapporteur Nacho Sánchez Amor and carried in Strasbourg. It is the assembly's yearly verdict on how far the country stands from the bloc, and this year's verdict is that it stands no closer.
The report's core finding, in its own framing, is that accession cannot be relaunched under current circumstances. The Parliament dates the standstill to 2018 and lays it at Türkiye's door, arguing the country is passing up a chance to re-engage because it has not made the democratic reforms the Parliament wants to see. Membership criteria, the report says, are not negotiable: stable institutions, rule of law, human rights, press freedom.
Those are the Parliament's words for it. Ankara reads the same document as interference dressed as assessment.
The report also raises the domestic cases against opposition figures, among them former İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, who faces ongoing proceedings at Silivri. The Parliament frames these as pressure on the opposition, journalists, lawyers, and civil-society groups. İmamoğlu is the former mayor of İstanbul and his case is before the courts; the Parliament's characterization of those proceedings is the Parliament's, and Türkiye's rejection of it is Türkiye's.
Türkiye's Foreign Ministry issued its response the same day, statement No: 115. It called the report a product of baseless claims and misinformation from circles hostile to the country, prepared, it said, within a deliberate political agenda that reflects the ideological preconceptions of some members of the Parliament. The sharpest line was reserved for the judiciary. The Turkish judiciary, the ministry said, is one of the pillars of the state's sovereignty and is not open to the interference of any international institution, external actor, or political circle. It rejected what it described as baseless accusations aimed at Justice Minister Akın Gürlek.
Gürlek answered for himself. No one can wag a finger at Turkish courts, he said, dismissing the attempt to lean on trials that are underway and internal matters that are Türkiye's alone to settle.
Tucked into the report is the Parliament's usual line on good-neighborly relations, its standing hook for Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration. The report calls on Türkiye to respect the sovereign rights of member states. In Ankara's reading these are the live disputes of the Aegean, where the question is treaty compliance and the demilitarized status of the eastern islands, and of Cyprus, where Türkiye acted in 1974 as a guarantor power and continues to answer for Turkish Cypriot rights and the TRNC. The Parliament's member-state framing is its own; Türkiye does not adopt it. The assembly passed a separate resolution on the 1974 Peace Operation earlier this month, which Ankara and the TRNC called null and void.
The gap between the two capitals is not narrowing. The Parliament writes the freeze into the record once a year. At the NATO summit in Ankara this week, President Erdoğan pressed EU Council President António Costa and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to revive the accession process and reactivate the mechanisms that run it. The Parliament votes to hold the door shut. Erdoğan, in the same weeks, keeps knocking on it in person.