TURKEY: After voting to abolish the death penalty last Friday, Turkey's parliament continued its sprint towards European respectability on Saturday when it accepted the rest of a wide-ranging reform package. The package contained measures legalising previously forbidden TV and radio broadcasts in Kurdish, and allowing Kurdish and other regional languages to be taught privately.
Reactions in Turkey's overwhelmingly pro-European press were delirious. The normally sober liberal newspaper Radikal ran the headline "Feastday of democracy". Mass circulation daily Hurriyet's chief columnist Ertugrul Ozkok titled his article "Biji Turkiye", Kurdish for "long live Turkey", words which before this weekend could have brought the police to his door.
It now seems possible Turkey will be given a definite date for European accession at the conference on enlargement in Copenhagen this December.
Within Turkey, though, there have been dissenting voices.
The leader of the ultra-nationalist National Action Party (MHP) Mr Devlet Bahceli has staunchly opposed reforms from the very start.
Stating that he would be applying to the constitutional court to cancel the laws, he said on Saturday that "this \ is not a victory, it's the result of a mentality of surrender. \ These laws are in line with the demands made by the terrorist PKK."
More than 30,000 people died during the Kurdish group's 15-year war against the Turkish state, and many here have not forgiven the European Union for what they perceive as its unsympathetic attitude towards the Turkish army's often brutal attempts to restore order in the south-east.
Above all, Mr Bahceli's words play on suspicions among some Turks that the EU has sweeping designs on Turkey's sovereignty. Nationalists here have not forgotten British and French plans in 1920 to hand a broad swathe of Anatolia to Kurds and Armenians. According to commentators, the widespread feeling that reforms were passed on Brussels' behest could strengthen the nationalists' hand in coming elections.
"Bahceli could get a lot of mileage out of claims that he alone stood against foreign plans to save the 'traitor', ex-PKK leader Ocalan", said one source in Ankara, on condition of anonymity.
Legal advances do not necessarily mean Turkey will be more willing to soften its stance on Cyprus.
"Turkey's lawmakers were pushed unwillingly into making these changes", says the source. "Many of them now think it is Europe's turn to make compromises."
In the majority Kurdish south-east, the reforms are seen as a step in the right direction.