Sweden’s governing party supports NATO membership – POLITICO
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On Sunday, Sweden’s ruling Social Democratic Party supported the idea that the country should join NATO in a historic political turnaround that paves the way for a formal membership application in the coming days.
The move for Sweden is in line with neighboring Finland, where both the president and the prime minister said last week that their country should join the Western military alliance.
Observers say that Sweden’s official NATO bid may come as soon as Monday, with Finland likely to follow a similar timeline.
Sweden has avoided all military alliances for more than two centuries, with national armaments as former Prime Minister Olof Palme famously foreshadowing how his country’s military independence allowed it to be a force for world peace.
But in recent decades, Sweden has become more openly connected to NATO, signed a cooperation agreement called Partnership for Peace 1994 and ratified a host nation agreement in 2016, which makes it easier for troops from the alliance to operate on Swedish territory.
Last week, a Swedish parliamentary report on the country’s security strategy indicated that NATO membership would “raise the threshold for military conflicts”, a position that the Social Democratic Foreign Minister Ann Linde reiterated when she presented the report’s conclusions on Friday.