Sweden moved a step closer to becoming NATO’s 32nd member after Turkey’s Parliament voted on Jan. 23 to ratify the Nordic country’s application to join the trans-Atlantic military alliance.
The vote comes three months after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent Sweden’s NATO membership bill to Parliament for ratification.
While Mr. Erdogan is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming days, he has a track record of using Sweden’s entry to NATO as leverage to negotiate the purchase of 40 new F-16 fighter jets 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 clamp down on Kurdish exiles characterized by Mr. Erdogan 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. He also insists that Sweden hasn’t taken sufficient actions to deal with Sweden-based PKK activities.
The Jan. 23 vote leaves Hungary as 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.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Jan. 23 that he sent a letter to his Swedish counterpart, Ulf Kristersson, inviting him to Budapest to discuss the 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 the social media platform X. Mr. Kristersson’s office didn’t immediately respond to the invitation.
Relations between Hungary and Sweden have deteriorated in recent 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 is “in a special situation” because there are 155,000 ethnic Hungarians living in western Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region, with many of them fighting on 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 of that year.
Finland became the 31st member of NATO in April 2023. 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 eastward 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 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.”
