For several decades, French persons of Armenian origin have played a special role in Franco-Turkish relations. History explains this. Armenians originally came to France fleeing the massacres at the end of the Ottoman Empire, and for nearly a century they have integrated perfectly into the French social and political landscape, while keeping the memory of past traumas intact. Recognition of the 1915 genocide has been an explicit claim by the Armenian Diaspora scattered across the four corners of the world. In 2001, such recognition was voted by the French Parliament, and has thus become a subject of discord between France and Turkey.

For several years the French-Turkish bilateral relationship is experiencing a phase of crisis and readjustments.

Turkey has become a recurrent issue in France's domestic political debate, following the referendum campaign on the European Consti­tutional Treaty in spring 2005. While the question of Turkish EU membership is itself a point of discussion, evoking Turkey also tou­ches on other sensitive political issues in France. It elicits controversy that goes beyond the Left-Right cleavage. In this article, Alain Chenal* studies the trend in the evolution of the debate during the campaign for the European elections in June 2009.

Dorothée Schmid, Head of the Contemporary Turkey Program at the IFRI