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WATCH: PKK Youth Fight for Autonomy in Turkey
The Turkish government, which is run by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former semi-professional football player who thinks social media is run by a "robot lobby", is not particularly bothered about EU membership. "We'll go our way, and you'll go yours," he told the EU last month.Erdogan's party, the Islamist-rooted AKP, has been in power since 2003. Though he was originally embraced by the west as a reformist who would relax the country's strict secularist laws – which banned women from wearing headscarves in public places – many have turned against him in recent years.His critics claim he has developed authoritarian tendencies, including allowing the arrest of thousands of people for "insulting" him and cracking down on the free press. One man who shared a picture on Facebook comparing him to Gollum could face a two-year prison sentence.Turkey's sentiment towards the EU is constantly changing. According to Akin Unver, assistant professor of international relations at Istanbul's Kadir Has University, support for the EU tends to go up whenever Turkey is affected by instability in the region. What with Syria, Iraq and Ukraine being pretty much the definition of unstable at the moment, that means there's been a gradual increase in support since 2014.
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