Following its application to accede to the EEC 1987, Turkey signed a Customs Union agreement in 1995 and was officially recognized as a candidate for full membership in 1999. The start of the accession negotiations in 2005 notwithstanding, Turkey’s path to becoming a full membership turned out to be long and without a clear map even to this day. While the positioning of political actors on enlargement within the EU received considerable scholarly attention, the positioning within the candidate countries has been less explored. Turkey, with its changing dynamics, offers a particularly interesting case. Analyzing all Turkish parliamentary debates between 1987 and 2018, we examine how Turkish parties use the accession negotiations strategically in party competition. First, we examine which parties put the negotiations on the parliamentary agenda and when. In a further step, we use topic models to inquire the extent to which the content of the debate has changed over time. We thus examine whether different parties try to link the discourse with different issues in order to gain political advantage. In the final step, we analyze how the tone of the parliamentary debate on the negotiations has changed. To what extent has it reflected the current state of the negotiations, or has it also been shaped more by partisan motives? Our findings not only have important implications for the study of the enlargement process of the EU and the Turkey-EU relations in particular. They also provide new insight into strategic issue linkage and agenda-setting.