Turkey has given up its opposition to Sweden joining NATO. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan published a statement to this effect on Monday evening in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius together with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. In it, Erdoğan promised to forward the accession ratification protocol to the Turkish parliament and to work to ensure that it was passed. That should happen “as soon as possible,” said Stoltenberg.
With Erdoğan’s commitment, what is probably the most important remaining hurdle to Sweden’s acceptance into the defense alliance has been cleared. Hungary and Turkey are the only ones of the 31 NATO members in which the northern country’s accession has not yet been ratified by the parliaments. While NATO diplomats are not taking Hungarian resistance particularly seriously and expect Budapest to relent once Turkey moves, Erdoğan’s blockade has been a serious issue that threatened to weigh heavily on the NATO summit meeting that begins in Vilnius this Tuesday.
As recently as Monday morning, Erdoğan had shown himself to be uncompromising and even raised a new demand: Before he left Turkey for Vilnius, he suddenly demanded that the European Union first have to resume talks with Ankara about EU membership before he could could agree to Swedish membership in NATO. “First pave the way for Turkey into the European Union, after that we pave the way for Sweden, just as we paved the way for Finland.”said the Turkish President.
The federal government is surprised by Erdoğan’s condition
This linking of two accession processes that have nothing to do with each other caught Turkey’s NATO allies and the alliance itself largely cold. So far, Erdoğan has justified his resistance to Sweden’s accession by saying that the government in Stockholm is not taking tough enough action against “terrorist organizations” – that is, the Kurdish militia PKK. Erdoğan complained that there were Turkish citizens living in Sweden who were being investigated in Turkey. Most of them are Kurds. The Swedish government has therefore tightened anti-terror laws in recent months and also lifted an existing arms embargo against Turkey.
In the past few days, NATO diplomats had been relatively optimistic about Turkey and Sweden. Erdoğan’s unforgiving statements on Monday were almost tantamount to a diplomatic affront – not just to Stockholm, but to NATO as a whole. Secretary General Stoltenberg, who this year managed to bring Finland into the alliance, did not allow himself to be discouraged.
He met twice with Erdoğan and Kristersson on Monday afternoon. The trilateral talks were suspended in the evening to allow Erdoğan to meet with EU Council President Charles Michel. This promised Turkey a “revitalization of relations”. The EU and Turkey began negotiations on Turkey’s admission in 1999, but these have been on hold for years because Erdoğan’s increasingly autocratic rule. In order to officially continue the negotiations, both the EU governments and the European Parliament would have to make the appropriate decisions.
The United States was pleased with Turkey’s commitment: US President Joe Biden welcomed by Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda in Vilnius.
(Photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Many NATO and EU countries have reacted openly to Erdoğan’s initiative. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in Berlin on Monday that there was nothing standing in the way of Sweden joining the alliance “if you look at the facts”. The question of Turkey’s EU membership, on the other hand, is one “that is not related”.
The US State Department said on Monday that Sweden’s NATO accession and Turkey’s admission to the EU were “separate issues”. Erdoğan had already lodged his idea of linking the two issues with the American government in a phone call to President Joe Biden on Sunday evening. Erdoğan’s PR team named the topics of the conversation in a press release afterwards, alongside Sweden’s desire for admission, the “position of Ukraine in NATO” and the delivery of F-16-combat aircraft by the USA also “Turkey’s process for full EU membership”.
Erdoğan also told Biden that Sweden had taken “a few steps in the right direction” by tightening terror laws. However, these would be “nullified” because supporters of the Kurdish organizations PKK and YPG are allowed to continue demonstrating in Sweden and “praising terror”. That wasn’t what Biden was hoping to hear. Accordingly, the White House reacted with delight to the statement in which Erdoğan cleared the way for the ratification of the accession protocol.
Erdoğan is politically committed to Sweden joining NATO
How quickly Sweden will actually become a full member of NATO and when it will be under the protection of the alliance’s obligation to provide military assistance is still unclear. Both Erdoğan and his Hungarian colleague Viktor Orbán could try to delay the ratification process in their parliaments. But Erdoğan’s commitment at least binds him politically, and he can hardly pull new demands out of a hat. For NATO is the second best result. It would have been best if Erdoğan had given in earlier and Sweden could have attended the Vilnius summit as the 32nd full member of the alliance. But Erdoğan’s political commitment to end the blockade is also seen as a great success in NATO – and as a signal to Russia that the alliance is closed.