Turkey pushes back the vote on Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession | NATO
Turkey is unlikely to vote on Sweden and Finland joining NATO before crucial domestic elections expected in May or June this year, according to a senior Turkish official.
“We are in no rush here, they are in a rush to join NATOİbrahim Kalın, chief adviser to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, told journalists.
“Given the fact that the president will have to send this bill to parliament to ratify it, lawmakers need to be convinced. To be honest with you, we will not be able to get this passed just like that from parliament.
“We don’t have the numbers, the opposition will ask all sorts of questions, and we can’t risk our political capital going into elections in the next three or four months,” he said.
An important general election i Turkey expected before June, when Erdoğan is expected to face a six-party opposition coalition at the ballot box, aiming to challenge his campaign to extend his rule into a third decade.
Only Turkey and Hungary, two nations that have maintained relations with Moscow since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have stopped short of the parliamentary votes needed to approve the accession of Finland and Sweden, although Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, said late last year that Hungary’s parliament would vote on the move in February. The next NATO summit is expected to take place in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in July.
Ankara has been under increasing pressure from Swedish and Finnish officials as well as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg to approve the accession since the three countries signed a trilateral memorandum during a NATO summit in Madrid last June. The two Nordic countries agreed to address the security concerns raised by Turkey, namely the presence of Kurdish organizations in Sweden which Ankara claims has links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Turkey, the EU and Washington have designated as a terrorist group.
Both Nordic countries lifted restrictions on arms exports to Ankara and Sweden changed its constitution to toughen domestic anti-terrorism laws.
At the same time, Turkey has pushed for Sweden to hand over a list of people it claims have links to either the PKK or the banned cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Ankara accuses of being behind an attempted coup in 2016, including a journalist whose extradition was recently blocked by a Swedish court.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, told a Homeland Security conference earlier this month that Stockholm would not be able to meet all of Turkey’s demands. “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,” he said.
Kalın disagreed. “In principle, of course, we would like to see them in NATO provided they meet the conditions that we have agreed,” he said.
“Finland and Sweden have delivered on their commitment to Turkey,” Stoltenberg told a press conference in November last year, after talks with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu. “It is time to welcome Finland and Sweden as full members of NATO.”