BRUSSELS (AFP) - Turkeys prime minister sought Friday to revitalise its EU membership bid, bogged down amid opposition from Paris and Berlin on top of historical differences over Cyprus. No other candidate nation has been submitted to this kind of treatment, deplored Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who travelled to Brussels with two senior colleagues for talks with European Union officials. This situation has to change, he added. Some countries have adopted a political attitude in the negotiation process and their efforts to slow things down upsets us, he told reporters without mentioning Cyprus, France or Germany - the three EU nations doing most to put the brakes on the accession talks. Turkey, with some 70 million inhabitants, would not only be one of the EUs biggest member states but the first mainly Muslim country to be inducted. Ankara formally opened its EU membership talks in October 2005. Since then it has managed to open up 10 of the 35 policy chapters which all candidate nations must negotiate successfully prior to accession. EU and Turkish officials said that an 11th chapter, on taxation, would be opened in Brussels next Tuesday. Eight other chapters have been frozen since 2006 due to Ankaras refusal to open its ports and airports to EU member Cyprus. Cyprus has been divided between ethnic Turkish and Greek sides since 1974. France is blocking another five chapters directly linked to EU membership. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, along with their Austrian colleagues, favour some kind of special relationship with Turkey which falls short of full membership. The issue got a full airing during campaigning for recent EU parliamentary elections, and reluctance to embrace Turkey as a European Union member garnered a certain support at the ballots. With such hurdles reducing the accession process to a snails pace, without even the guarantee of membership at the end of it, the Turkish government has decided it is time to try and push things along a bit. Erdogan bemoaned the fact that Turkey was used as an election card calling such tactics populist and wrong. The Turkish PM refused to contemplate the kind of privileged partnership with the EU envisaged by Paris and Berlin as an alternative to EU membership. We dont want anything less than full and complete membership, he stressed. However he was promising nothing on Cyprus, despite the fact that the EU wants to see the airports and ports ban lifted by the end of the year. So is Ankara risking having the EU negotiations suspended entirely? Antonio Missiroli, researcher at the European Policy Centre in Brussels thinks not. I dont think anyone on the EU side is interested in dramatising the situation and turning it into a confrontation, he said. Whats most likely is that there will be a slowdown in negotiations, he said. Ankara has one trump card to play; its key role in the Nabucco gas pipeline project. The 3,300-kilometre Nabucco pipeline is designed to bring gas from the Caspian Sea to Austria via Turkey, while bypassing Russia, in a bid to reduce Europes energy dependence on Moscow. We talk about Nabucco but the energy chapter (one of the 35) is not under discussion. So why are we not talking on energy? Erdogan said. Our European friends have a unilateralistic approach on this, he added.