Dolan wrote:@duckzilla
If you want to talk based on evidence, check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%8 ... by_numbers
How is this even remotely comparable to Romania/Hungary/Poland? These states have adopted some laws that may disrupt the rule of law in subtle ways, like making anti-corruption prosecution harder or making the constitutional court less independent. But there are degrees of gravity. And none of these countries are imprisoning journalists, laying off people because of their political views and so on. There's a world of difference between these three countries and Turkey. It's like another world. And Turkey seems to be hellbent on allying itself with Russia, which is not a very loyal behaviour for a NATO ally, is it?
Thanks for the numbers and I may have exaggerated a bit about nowaday Romania.
Turkey is surely on a bad way, I don't want to defend that. But I'm convinced that the perspective of entering the European Union can change a lot within a country. 15-20 years ago, Turkey was arguably an entirely different country than today. From a EU perspective, Romania/Bulgaria/Turkey were not too different from each other with regard to the criteria for entering the EU. While Bulgaria/Romania were offered membership, Turkey was not. This led changes in all three countries. While Bulgaria/Romania started a slow convergence to the other countries of the EU in societal dimensions such as free press, democratic political system, etc., Turkey did not. Turkey went into the opposite direction, since people realized that Europeans will never view the Turkish as a part of Europe out of cultural reasons, i.e. due to racism.
"Turkey seems hellbent on allying itself with Russia" - sorry, I have to assume that this is a bad joke. Turkey wanted to become part of Europe and was basically ignored. This is a country that westernized itself as much as it could, even changed the written language from Arabian to Latin already 100 years ago. It views itself as European since the first conquests of Osman in the 14th century. This country surely does not want to ally with its long-term rival that is Russia, who 1) recently annexed the Crimean Peninsula in the direct neighborhood of Istanbul and 2) is an active warmonger in Syria directly south of Turkey - it feels threatened!
But who exactly are Turkey's allies? The Europeans who leave them out of the club? Turkey does not have any allies! Turkey only has a NATO consisting of countries which do not regard Turkey as one of their own (western, civilized, etc.).
I demand that people do not only see differences between countries and peoples. I would love to welcome Turkey in the European Union as brothers and sisters sharing the same goals (peace, democracy, liberty, prosperity, etc.), just like we welcomed all the other new member states since the 1970s.
tldr: Romania is nice, Turkey too.
MUCH better 
