After Finland, Sweden now also wants to be admitted to NATO – but Turkey under Erdogan is vehemently blocking the project. How does his re-election affect the accession negotiations?
After the election victory of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Green Party leader Omid Nouripour called on the government in Ankara to end the blockade on Sweden’s accession to NATO.
“The course of the Turkish government has recently been the rifts between Türkiye and European Union and deterred investors from the West, who the country urgently needs,” Nouripour told the Rheinische Post. He hopes for more reliable relations .” The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, Michael Roth, also demands this. Erdogan must give up his veto before the NATO summit in July, the SPD politician told the editorial network Deutschland (RND).
Against the background of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, Sweden applied together with Finland a year ago to be included in the western defense alliance. All Member States must agree to the application. Erdogan’s Turkey has long blocked Sweden’s membership. Erdogan won a runoff against his challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu on Sunday.
FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai called for an end to the EU accession process. “This Turkish government is light years away from Europe,” he told RND. The voting behavior of some Turks in Germany is also disappointing. It leaves behind “many integration-political questions”. Turkey has been on an authoritarian course for years. “Human and civil rights are being systematically restricted and the economic situation is desolate. This course will continue.”
The CDU foreign politician Norbert Röttgen also expects a further economic decline in Turkey. “The whole of Turkey will pay dearly for Erdogan’s manipulated election victory with the inevitable further economic decline,” Röttgen told the “Rheinische Post”. “This is likely to tempt Erdogan to further radicalize at home and to become even more unpredictable in foreign policy from the Western perspective.”