NATO
Erdogan proposes Sweden’s NATO membership to parliament
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Türkiye. photo
© Christoph Soeder/dpa
Turkey blocked Sweden’s planned accession to NATO for months. Finland has already been included. The talks were considered deadlocked. Now there is a surprising twist.
After months of tug-of-war, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has submitted Sweden’s application to parliament to join Submitted to NATO for ratification. Erdogan signed the accession protocol and forwarded it to the Grand National Assembly, the presidential office announced on Monday. Approval is considered likely – Erdogan’s Islamic-conservative AKP alliance has a majority in parliament. The MPs want to meet in Ankara on Tuesday, but it was initially unclear whether the application would be discussed then.
Turkey had blocked Sweden’s accession to NATO for months, justifying this with what it saw as Sweden’s inadequate deployment against “terrorist organizations”. Ankara is primarily concerned with the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party PKK and the Syrian Kurdish militia YPG.
Erdogan’s approval now comes as a surprise. Recently, negotiations on this with Sweden were considered deadlocked. The Turkish blockade actually seemed to have been resolved this summer: Immediately before the NATO summit in Vilnius in July, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that Erdogan had agreed to the accession protocol as soon as possible at a meeting with the Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to be presented to the Turkish Parliament. Since then, however, this has not happened – until Monday.
Kristersson: “pleasant” news
Kristersson now described it as “pleasant” news that Erdogan had presented the ratification document to the Turkish parliament. It is now up to Parliament to deal with the question of Sweden joining NATO. “We are looking forward to becoming a member of NATO,” Kristersson said on the online platform X.
NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg was expected in Sweden on Tuesday for a two-day visit. Among other things, he then wanted to meet Prime Minister Kristersson and give a speech at an industrial forum on Wednesday.
In view of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership in May 2022. Finland was welcomed into the alliance as the 31st member in early April.
However, only 29 of the 31 current NATO members have given their consent for Sweden’s accession – Turkey and Hungary are still missing. If the Turkish parliament agrees promptly, Sweden’s inclusion in the defense alliance will ultimately depend on Hungary.