Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday he spoke again of Sweden’s accession to NATO, the military alliance that includes a large part of Western countries, which has so far been blocked precisely because of Turkey’s opposition. During a press conference organized before leaving for Vilnius, Lithuania, where NATO’s annual meeting will take place on July 11 and 12, Erdogan said he was open to Sweden joining the alliance, but condition:
“First we pave the way for Turkey to join the European Union, and then we will pave the way for Sweden as we did with Finland”
Erdogan’s words are deliberately provocative, given that the entry of a country into the European Union and NATO membership are two processes with extremely different logics and paths, and in no way connected. Turkey was officially recognized as a candidate country to join the European Union in 1999, but for several years the negotiations have practically stopped, also due to the progressive centralization of powers carried out by Erdogan.
On the contrary, the negotiations for Sweden’s accession to NATO have been in a very advanced stage for months, blocked only by the opposition of Turkey and Hungary.
Sweden had applied to join NATO in May 2022, a few months after the start of the war in Ukraine, and had applied together with Finland. The two countries should have joined together, but the files were separated precisely because of the persistent opposition of Turkey, which accuses the Swedish government of supporting and welcoming members of some Kurdish organizations, in particular of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) which Turkey (as well as most Western countries) considers it a terrorist organization.
The NATO regulation provides that entry must be approved unanimously by all the member countries of the alliance, and a few weeks after the presentation of the request, most of these had ratified the entry of Sweden and Finland: Hungary and Turkey had however postponed the decision, which should have gone through a parliamentary debate. In both cases the controversial target was above all Sweden, and the real opposition was that of Turkey: the negotiations with Hungary were all in all simpler.
After rather lengthy negotiations and some hesitation, it was finally agreed that Finland would be admitted to NATO immediately, and that Sweden would wait. Turkey and Hungary had therefore ratified the entry of Finland, which on 4 April had become the 31st member country of the military alliance.
In recent months, Sweden has made various concessions to Turkey to convince it to give its favorable opinion: at the end of May, for example, it had approved a new anti-terrorism law, which went in the direction requested by the Turkish government, which included the crime of «participation in a terrorist group”, previously absent from its legislation. The law was first applied in early July, when a Kurdish man was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for trying to finance the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).