Sweden is another step closer to becoming NATO’s 32nd member after the parliament of Turkey on Tuesday voted to ratify the Nordic country’s application to join the transatlantic military alliance.
The vote comes three months after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sent Sweden’s NATO membership bill to parliament for ratification.
Mr. Erdoğan is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming days, although he has a track record of using Sweden’s entry into NATO as leverage to negotiate the sale of 40 new F-16 jet fighters from the United States. The $20 billion warplane deal has been held up in the U.S. Senate.
Ankara has also been demanding that Stockholm crack down on Kurdish exiles whom he characterized as terrorists, including members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a left-wing separatist group seeking to carve an independent Kurdistan out of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, where ethnic Kurds live. Mr. Erdoğan has insisted that Sweden hasn’t taken sufficient actions to deal with Sweden-based PKK activities.
Tuesday’s vote makes Hungary the only NATO member whose legislatures have yet to sign off on Sweden’s accession. Hungary had previously assured Sweden that it wouldn’t be the last in the alliance to approve the membership bid.
Earlier on Tuesday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said he sent a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Ulf Kristersson, inviting him to Budapest to discuss that matter.
“Today I sent an invitation letter to Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for a visit to Hungary to negotiate on Sweden’s NATO accession,” Mr. Orbán wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Mr. Kristersson’s office did not immediately respond to the invitation.
Relations between Hungary and Sweden have deteriorated over the past months after Swedish politicians repeatedly argued that Hungary should no longer be considered a democracy. Hungarian officials called such comments “unacceptable and offensive.”
Hungary’s attitude toward Sweden’s NATO bid is further complicated by the war between Russia and Ukraine, which is heading into its third year and has prompted Finland and Sweden to apply for NATO membership.
In a speech last October in Montenegro, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said that his country was “in a special situation” because there are 155,000 ethnic Hungarians living in western Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region, with many of them fighting in the front. “We Hungarians do not want that many more people, many more ethnic Hungarians should die,” he said.
Sweden applied to join NATO in May 2022, at the same time as Finland, in a historic shift in their security policy after Russia launched its full-scale military campaign in Ukraine in February earlier that year.
Finland became the 31st member of NATO last April. Joining the alliance means Finland falls under what’s known as Article 5, a collective defense clause that pledges members to come to the assistance of any state that is under attack, or in its own words, an attack on one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.”
The accession of Finland almost doubled NATO’s border with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin, a furious critic of NATO’s westward expansion who partly used that as a justification for what he called a “special military operation” against Ukraine, has vowed “problems” for Finland.
“Look, Finland was taken and dragged into NATO,” Putin said in an interview last December. “What did we have, some kind of dispute with Finland? All disputes, including those of a territorial nature in the middle of the 20th century, were all resolved a long time ago.”
“There weren’t any problems, but now there will be,” he said. “Because we’ve now been forced to create a Leningrad military district and concentrate a certain number of military units there. Why do they need that? It’s just nonsense. The same goes for other countries, including NATO countries.”
“With whom did we have problems? Nobody. They’re the ones who are artificially creating problems with us. Because they don’t want such a competitor in the form of Russia. That’s all there is to it.”
From The Epoch Times
