When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey meets Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, he will find a changed mood from the days of Gerhard Schröder, one of Europe's strongest advocates for Turkey to join the EU.

Although Merkel did not veto last year's decision by the EU to start accession negotiations with Turkey, she is on record as preferring a "privileged partnership" that she says would allow Turkey most of the economic and trade benefits of closer cooperation without crossing the politically sensitive Rubicon of membership. But it is not just in the political class that the mood has changed in Germany, Europe's biggest and wealthiest country and home to the continent's largest Turkish population, estimated at 2.6 million, or 6 percent of the total.

Public opinion is beginning to question Turkey's secular credentials. Honor killings among Turks in Germany - particularly a high-profile case last month in which a young Turk was jailed for killing his sister who had built an independent life - are one reason for the shift. The outspoken criticism of Israel by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and the violence sparked by publication in Europe of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad are others. "Germans are feeling very uncertain about Islam," said Renate Köcher, a director of the Allensbach Institute, a leading polling organization. "This uncertainty feeds into the issue of integration and how the second and third generation of Turks born in Germany can become integrated."

While the German public is paying more attention to issues stirred by a confrontation with some Muslims, the Turkish-German Chamber of Industry and Trade is trying hard to focus on economic ties. Bilateral trade was worth more than €21 billion, or $26.8 billion, last year and Turkish businesses in Germany employ more than 370,000 people, said the chamber's president, Kemal Sahin. Erdogan will attend a three-day congress hosted by the chamber during his first visit to Germany since Merkel succeeded Schröder in November.

"Merkel wants to have a normal relationship with Turkey," said Heinz Kramer, a Turkey expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "The Schröder government raised expectations so much, particularly about Turkey's membership to the EU. Merkel wants to put the relationship back on a more even keel."

Suat Kiniklioglu, director of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said that before Germany's parliamentary elections last September, the Turkish government and political class had been dreading the prospect of a government led by Merkel. Her conservative Christian Democratic Union contains members who believe that Europe's borders should be defined by Christian values, unlike Schröder's Social Democrat- Greens coalition, which emphasized Turkey's value as a bridge between Europe and the Islamic Middle East.

Since then, Kiniklioglu added, "Germany and Merkel have been left on the horizon of Turkish foreign policy. The Turkish government has focused on domestic policies because of next year'spresidential and parliamentary elections. You can also detect here some changing attitudes towards Turkey by Germans."

According to a poll published last week by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion, an increasing number of Germans believe that a clash of civilizations is taking place between Christendom and Islam and that tensions with Muslims are rising. Allensbach showed that 48 percent of Germans polled last March said they believed in a clash of civilizations. By this month, the number had jumped to 56 percent. In the same earlier period, 44 percent said tensions with the Muslim communities would increase. By May, this had risen to 58 percent.

Kiniklioglu said that Turks have failed to understand the shift in Germany, particularly over honor killings, but "it is important that they do.

"As the largest of the EU countries and the biggest contributors to the EU budget, Germany holds the key to Turkey eventually joining the EU."