The European Commission publishes annual reports on the progress of EU candidate countries, accompanied by short press releases. I find noticeable differences between these reports and releases on Turkey; while the sentiments in the reports have been fairly stable over the years, the press releases often remarkably diverge from the reports.
The Commission’s latest report on Turkey hit the headlines as the worst EU scorecard so far.
To see if there is evidence for this claim, I analysed the sentiments in the EU reports on Turkey since 2005—the year the accession negotiations started.
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