Turkey has increased pressure on France to drop the law, with President Abdullah Gul and a Turkish delegation to Paris warning its adoption would ignite a diplomatic crisis and have economic consequences.
In a joint declaration, Turkey's ruling and opposition parties denounced it as a "grave, unacceptable and historic mistake", calling on France to consider its own past, including its role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its colonial past in North Africa.
Turkey claims the bill is blatant electioneering – an attempt to win votes with France's Armenian minority, estimated to number up to 500,000 people, ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections next year.
But European Affairs Minister Jean Leonetti said on Wednesday: "Today all peoples must be lucid and courageous in looking at their history. It has been nearly 100 years since the Armenian genocide took place, those responsible are dead, it is simply a matter of recognising a fact of history." He added that the opposition Socialists were planning to back the bill along with the ruling UMP party.
"If this was to win votes, I don't think the opposition would vote (for the law). But the Socialists will vote for this bill, which comes from a deputy, not from the government," he said.
However, French diplomatic sources cited by Le Monde conceded that the vote on the draft bill, approved by the Elysée, was part of Right-Left fight to win Armenian votes.
The Senate, which has a Socialist majority, had been due to vote on a 2006 law criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide but the Socialist-proposed bill was blocked in May by Mr Sarkozy's ruling UMP majority, leading to the new draft law. Mr Sarkozy had threatened to "throw a grenade without its pin in it" if Ankara continued to reject the term genocide while on a trip to Armenia in October.
The French president's relationship with Turkey was long frosty due to his opposition to the EU entry of the mainly Muslim nation. But ties had warmed in recent months as the two countries worked together on tackling the crisis in Syria and other regional hot spots.
Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister who has spearheaded the rapprochement, insists the draft law is not a government initiative and diplomats claim the spat will not affect the "fundamentals" of Franco-Turkish relations.
But the Turkish government has warned of "serious and irreparable" consequences. It is considering recalling the Turkish ambassador in Paris for consultations and asking the French ambassador in Turkey to leave.
Possible trade sanctions could target French interests in the country and exclude French companies from public contracts.
A similar diplomatic spat erupted in 2001 when Paris passed a law recognising the killings as genocide.
Armenia says up to 1.5 million of its people were killed during the First World War by forces belonging to Turkey's former Ottoman Empire.
Turkey rejects the term genocide and says between 300,000 and 500,000 Armenians, and at least as many Turks, died in combat or from starvation when Armenians rose up and sided with invading Russian forces.
The Telegraph
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