LONDON

The EU commissioner for neighborhood and enlargement Monday expressed hope for further steps in EU-Türkiye relations, saying they want to "re-energize" bilateral ties with Türkiye.

"We are actively engaged with Ankara to re-energize our bilateral relations," Oliver Varhelyi told in the Hungarian capital Budapest during the Interparliamentary Conference for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP).

"After five years, we just had a productive exchange with the Turkish Foreign Minister (Hakan Fidan) at the latest Gymnich meeting at the end of August," he noted, expressing his hope for further high-level dialogues, gradual re-engagement of the European Investment Bank, and relaunching the discussion on the mandate for the modernizations of the EU-Türkiye Customs Union.

Türkiye's invitation to the Gymnich meetings comes after a five-year hiatus.

Varhelyi added: "I do hope that all this is going to be reality in the very near future."

Ankara’s EU membership negotiations started in 2005 but entered a stalemate after 2007 due to the Cyprus issue and political opposition to Türkiye’s membership by several member states.

During his speech, Varhelyi highlighted the EU's enlargement policy as "a top priority" for the bloc, saying enlargement has become "inevitable," because there is no peace, prosperity, security of Europe without enlargement.

"It's no longer the question whether we will have enlargement. The question is when we will have enlargement," he added, recalling that in 2019, at the beginning of the commission's mandate, there were five candidate countries, and now there are nine.

Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Türkiye, and Ukraine are nine current candidate countries.

Kosovo, which is not recognized by five EU members, applied in December 2022, and is considered a potential candidate by the bloc.