Swedish foreign minister, Tobias Billström, said yesterday that Sweden expects Turkey to approve its NATO membership “within weeks”, according to his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan. “I had a bilateral meeting with my colleague, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who told me that he expected ratification to take place within weeks,” Billström said during a NATO meeting in Brussels. “We hope that this will take place soon and that there will be no new conditions in this negotiation, there have been no new demands from the Turkish government,” he said.
Turkish parliament began debating Sweden’s application to join the Atlantic Alliance in November, after Turkey’s own President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave the go-ahead for the process following an agreement during the NATO summit in July. Turkey and Hungary are in fact the only NATO members that have not yet approved Sweden’s candidacy, more than 18 months after Stockholm asked to join the coalition following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The process, however, is still stalled in Turkey’s parliamentary foreign committee, which recently postponed a final decision on whether to approve Sweden’s NATO membership – necessary for the proposal to be put to a vote by MPs in the Turkish Parliament – because, according to Turkish media, some committee members remain critical of Sweden’s lack of cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
Swedish foreign minister said yesterday that Hungary had assured him that it would not be the last country to approve NATO membership. “This means that the issue is more in Ankara’s hands than in Budapest’s,” Billström said. “We expect a ‘white smoke’ from Hungary as soon as there is a ‘white smoke’ from Turkey,” he said.
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Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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