Ankara - A constitutional crisis, parliamentary and presidential elections, and a flare-up in fighting in southeast Turkey took centre stage in Turkish politics in 2007. All this overshadowed what has in recent years been the country's main foreign policy objective - membership of the European Union.
Turkey's potential membership of the EU remains a controversial issue in Europe. French President Nicolas Sarkozy in particular has made it very clear that he does not want Turkey to join the union. Public surveys across the EU show what is called "enlargement fatigue."
Progress towards membership has been slow. Following last year's decision by the EU to suspend membership talks in eight out of 35 negotiating areas due to Turkey's refusal to open its ports to EU member Cyprus, only four negotiating chapters have been opened.
The EU Commission has been very critical of Turkey's failure to implement reforms. In its progress report issued in November, the commission noted that only limited progress had been made by Turkey and that significant further efforts are needed to guarantee freedom of expression, limit the military's influence on politics and to ensure minority rights.
In particular the EU has been critical of the failure of the government to abolish the infamous Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code which makes it a crime to "insult Turkishness", a law that has been used to prosecute writers and journalists.
In past years such criticism may well have sparked Turkey into action. In order to gain official membership status in 2005 the Turkish parliament made vast changes to Turkish law, abolishing the death penalty and increasing the rights of minorities, but with increasing hostility within Europe to Turkish membership of the union, the government in Ankara is under little pressure from its own public to bow to EU demands.
According to a German Marshall Fund of the United States study, the Turkish public has gone cold on the whole EU project. Turkish "warmth" towards the EU fell from 52 degrees in 2004 and 45 in 2006 to 26 in 2007.
"We have lost our so-called 'soft power' over Turkey", an EU diplomat told Deutsche Presse Agentur dpa. "They aren't listening any more."
Instead of looking to the EU, Turkey in 2007 focused inwards.
More than a million people took to the streets in April and May to protest the prospect of the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) electing their man, Abdullah Gul, to the presidency. Secularists feared that Gul, a founding member of the AKP, in the presidential palace would cement the AKP's hold on power in Turkey and could lead to the watering down of secular laws.
The staunchly-secularist military weighed in also with army chief Yasar Buyukyanit declaring that Turkey needed a true secularist as president, not a secularist in name only.
Seemingly bending to secularist pressure the Constitutional Court ruled the presidential election process invalid in a decision that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described a "bullet at democracy."
In response to the court's ruling Erdogan called early elections in June which his AKP duly won. After gaining support from smaller opposition parties Gul was elected president in August.
With elections out of the way the government moved onto what many Turks consider to be the country's biggest problem, Kurdish separatism.
After a lull in fighting over recent years rebels from the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) in 2007 stepped up attacks on military targets in south-east Turkey. More than a hundred soldiers were killed in attacks over the summer and protesters again filled the streets accusing the government of being soft on terrorism.
Earlier in the year Buyukyanit told reporters that it was clear that an incursion into northern Iraq was necessary to wipe out PKK bases and with the elections out of the way the government moved.
As the military deployed as many as 100,000 troops on the border, parliament voted to give authority for the government to launch a large-scale incursion.
Fearing that a Turkish incursion could destabilize northern Iraq, one of the few relatively calm regions in the war-torn country, the United States urged caution. While Erdogan last month said all was in place for an attack on PKK bases in Iraq, no operation has yet taken place.
Turkey enters 2008 with the PKK question still unanswered. Erdogan has hinted at a limited amnesty to try and convince PKK rebels to surrender but says that the military option is still available. Extreme suspicion still exists between the military and the government but on the issue of the PKK they appear together.
The PKK attacks, combined with a growing feeling that the EU does not want Turkey to become a member, have fuelled nationalism in 2007. As support for the EU, the United States and for liberalizing reforms drops, Turkey goes into 2008 looking inwards.
