Is the EU Still Concerned? A Computational Analysis of the Evolution of EU Stance on Democratic Backsliding in Turkey

Turkey has been an EU candidate country since 1999. Accession negotiations have been stalled since 2018 as the European Council noted that Turkey had been moving further away. To track Turkey's compliance with the accession criteria, the EU has often closely monitored Turkish political affairs and voiced criticism when the government violated civil and political liberties. This has started to change since the start of the refugee influx into the Schengen area in the aftermath of the Syrian Civil War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Turkey has become a key strategic partner to the EU rather than a prospective member — leaving a lingering question about Turkey's democratic decline: "Is the EU still concerned?" Through a computational analysis of 3,409 EUR-Lex documents spanning 2013 to 2026, this study tracks the EU's stance on democratic backsliding in Turkey. It demonstrates that strategic interests in migration, defence, and trade dominated the bilateral relations as a result of the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal in 2016 and further integration of Turkey into European defence. Keyword-in-context (KWIC) analysis further reveals that "conditionality" in the Turkish context referred exclusively to the EU-Turkey Deal on immigration, despite its established meaning in EU enlargement discourse. The findings of this study extend Bashirov and Yilmaz's transactionalism argument with longitudinal corpus evidence, and the EU's muted response to the imprisonment of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu in 2025 stands as the most visible expression of this structural transformation. In this context, Turkey serves as an important example to illustrate how the EU has prioritized its own strategic interests in a changing global order, even when it came at the expense of overlooking autocratization in one of its closest neighbors and longest-standing candidate countries.