Sweden warns that it cannot meet Turkey’s demands to support NATO’s bid
Sweden has said Turkey is demanding concessions Stockholm cannot make to approve its application to join NATO, as the prime minister insisted the country had done all it could to address Ankara’s concerns.
Ulf Kristersson, the new centre-right leader, threw down the gauntlet to Turkey on Sunday in the clearest indication yet from Stockholm that no more could be done to help Turkey release your resistance to Sweden and neighboring Finland joining the Western military alliance.
“Turkey confirms that we have done what we said we would do. But they also say that they want things that we cannot and do not want to give them. So the decision now lies with Turkey,” Kristersson said at a Swedish defense conference.
Sweden’s new government has said joining NATO is its top priority, and its application has been approved by 28 of the alliance’s 30 members. But Hungary – whose parliaments are expected to ratify Sweden’s and Finland’s membership bids in the coming weeks – and Turkey have yet to do so.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly accused Sweden of harboring Kurdish terrorists and alleged members of an Islamic sect blamed for a failed coup in 2016.
Erdoğan has singled out one journalist – Bülent Keneş, a former editor-in-chief of Today’s Zaman daily – and demanded his deportation for his alleged role in the coup attempt. In December, Sweden’s Supreme Court rejected the request for extradition, ruling that Keneş risked persecution for his political views in Turkey.
Stockholm has made one number of concessions to Ankara, including distancing itself from a Kurdish militia, lifting an embargo on arms exports to Turkey and emphasizing that it would work to fight terrorism.
Kristersson said on Sunday that Stockholm lives up to the commitments it made at the NATO summit in Madrid last July, but that it must follow the law on deportations, which is a legal process in Sweden without any role for the government.
Turkey’s foreign ministry did not immediately return a request for comment.
Opinion polls have shown that Swedes do not prefer to offer too many concessions to Turkey: in a poll for the daily Dagens Nyheter last week, 79 percent said they wanted Sweden to stand up for the rule of law – even if it delayed its NATO membership.
Asked whether Turkey would ratify Sweden’s membership before the presidential election in June, Kristersson said it was “impossible to know”.
Pekka Haavisto, Finland’s foreign minister, said it looked unlikely that Turkey would ratify membership for the two countries before the election, leaving the NATO summit in Vilnius in July as the next possible deadline.
Speaking at the same event on Sunday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did not directly refer to Turkey’s blocking of the process but said he was “glad that the agreement [with Ankara] has been followed up”. He was “sure that we will soon be able to extend a warm welcome [Sweden and Finland] as full members of NATO,” he said.
The membership of both countries “blurs out gray areas, strengthens the political community and . . . will make us all safer,” Stoltenberg said.
The NATO chief has staked his personal credibility on the membership process, having taken a personal role in striking the tripartite deal with Erdoğan last summer, traveling to meet the Turkish leader to urge him to lift the ratification block.
But on Sunday, he signaled that regardless of the process, the two applicants were already treated as members in a host of areas, including the alliance’s mutual defense clause. “It is inconceivable that NATO would not act if the security of Sweden and Finland were threatened,” he added.
Kristersson also explained Sweden’s potential military contribution to NATO once the country became a member. The country would participate in NATO’s air policing mission in the Baltic states, the Black Sea and Iceland, he said. Sweden would also seek to join the European Sky Shield Initiative, a German-led plan to create a continental air and missile defense system.
Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul