Selling Turkey
Turkey's new spin-doctor-in-chief, defies the stereotype of the traditional Turkish woman. She is more likely to be seen wearing a Chanel scarf than a head scarf. She is adept at number-crunching as well as kickboxing. And she helps run Boyner Holding, Turkey's biggest retail empire. Eager to shed Turkey's image as a poor agrarian country that will drag down Europe's struggling economies, Turkey Inc. has chosen Boyner, 42, to engineer its biggest public relations campaign ever: a decade-long sell job to convince a skeptical continent that Turkey should be a part of the European Union. "We have a serious PR problem on our hands," Boyner, who was chosen by Turkey's influential business community, with the support of the Turkish government, said in an interview. "We need to show Europeans that we are not some two-bit country." Next to her, a photograph of European legislators holding cards saying yes during a vote approving EU entry talks with Turkey dominates the room.So far, Turkey has done a poor job of selling itself, said Gerald Knaus, a European affairs expert at the European Stability Initiative, a research group in Berlin. "It desperately needs to court European public opinion and make a convincing argument of why the EU should let it in," he said.
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