The Turkish parliament has given its long-awaited approval to Sweden\u2019s membership of Nato, bringing the Nordic country significantly closer to joining the western military alliance after months in limbo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three months after\u00a0Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, the Turkish president, submitted a bill on approving membership to parliament, MPs voted in favour of ratifying it late on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a four-hour debate, 287 of 346 MPs voted yes, 35 against and the rest abstained. Erdo\u011fan is expected to sign the bill into law in the coming days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, reacted quickly to the news, saying: \u201cToday we are one step closer to becoming a full member of\u00a0Nato. Positive that the Grand General Assembly of T\u00fcrkiye has voted in favour of Sweden\u2019s Nato accession.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tobias Billstr\u00f6m, Sweden\u2019s foreign minister, said the vote was \u201cof course good\u201d, but that the government was now waiting for the Turkish president to sign the ratification and send it on. \u201cOf course we are not finished with the process until it has happened, on the Turkish side,\u201d he told Swedish broadcaster SVT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nato\u2019s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, welcomed the vote, saying he expected\u00a0Hungary\u00a0to ratify Sweden \u201cas soon as possible\u201d. He added: \u201cSweden\u2019s membership makes Nato stronger and us all safer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turkey\u2019s approval leaves Hungary as the only country still to ratify Swedish membership. Earlier on Tuesday, the Hungarian prime minister,\u00a0Viktor Orb\u00e1n, hinted at progress by inviting Kristersson to visit for negotiations on the question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a letter, he wrote: \u201cI believe that a more intensive dialogue could contribute to reinforcing trust between our countries and institutions thus allowing to further strengthen our political and security arrangements.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A spokesperson for Kristersson said they did not have any comment on the invite for now, but Billstr\u00f6m said that before responding the government would need to \u201cthink through what the letter signals\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sweden applied to join Nato in May 2022,\u00a0at the same time as Finland, in a historic shift in its security policy prompted by Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine that February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The outgoing Finnish president, Sauli Niinist\u00f6, congratulated Sweden, writing on X, formerly Twitter, in Swedish: \u201cI am very glad of the Turkish parliament\u2019s vote to ratify Sweden\u2019s Nato membership. Sweden\u2019s membership will improve security in the Baltic region and make the whole alliance stronger. When Sweden is a member, Finland\u2019s membership will also be completed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turkey and Hungary, both of whom maintain better relations with Russia than other members of the organisation, raised objections, holding up a process that requires unanimity among Nato\u2019s member countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finland finally joined last year but\u00a0Ankara pressed Stockholm to toughen its stance on members of the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 party (PKK)\u00a0based in Sweden, which the US and the EU as well as Turkey deem a terrorist group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sweden has already signed a deal with the US giving full access to 17 of its military bases and started the Nato integration process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paul Levin,\u00a0the director of the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, said Sweden\u2019s Nato membership would be very significant for the Nordic country.
\u201cOrb\u00e1n has promised not to delay the process, so Turkish ratification should mean Swedish Nato accession. That will be a huge deal for a country with a long tradition of neutrality and a policy of nonalignment that it only decided to abandon in the face of increased Russian aggression,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAt the same time, it has been a gradual process that began after the end of the cold war. EU accession in 1995 meant the end of neutrality for Sweden.\u201d
However, he warned that the grappling with Ankara over Swedish membership may have a lasting impact. \u201cThis has been a trying time for relations between Turkey and Sweden and while it will be good to have it behind us, I suspect that the acrimonious process has done lasting damage to the relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sweden\u2019s Turkish community was divided over the issue, he added. \u201cThere are many Kurdish Swedes who have been worried that this would mean that Sweden would no longer be the champion of their cause and that Sweden would heed Erdo\u011fan\u2019s demands for extraditions of large numbers of Kurds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut there are also many Turkish Swedes, and some Kurds, who are happy that Sweden, as they see it, is finally getting tough on the PKK.\u201d
Hungary\u2019s government submitted the ratification of Sweden\u2019s Nato application to parliament in 2022, but a final vote has been delayed repeatedly. While the decision is formally up to parliament, Orb\u00e1n\u2019s tight grip on his ruling Fidesz party means that the ratification, de facto, is in the hands of the prime minister.
Hungarian officials have in the past presented different narratives domestically about Sweden\u2019s application, while insisting to western allies that Budapest would not be last to sign off.
A senior European diplomat said: \u201cIt is crucial this dossier moves forward sooner rather than later and there are indeed signals all remaining allies understood the importance of having Sweden in Nato as soon as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTurkey much more than Hungary is looking for specific gains in this game,\u201d the diplomat said, adding that in the case of Budapest, \u201cclearly the rhetoric is only for some political minor gains but cannot be sustained when facing the whole of the alliance\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Turkish parliament has given its long-awaited approval to Sweden\u2019s membership of Nato, bringing the Nordic country significantly closer to joining the western military alliance after months in limbo. Three months after\u00a0Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, the Turkish president, submitted a bill on approving membership to parliament, MPs voted in favour of ratifying it late on Tuesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":41343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[4836,6728,3152,11941,4321,7556,7960,7711,5341,11399,539,8041,159,9505,9127,5335,5345,2264,5626,5252,9907,8145,10342,5572,4995,2402,12187,4802,8000,5395,11973,1198,3805,3174,6426,3457,5217,5655,1378,9209,7609,2570,5350,5180,214,6348,7555,5251,594,10353],"class_list":["post-41342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-access","tag-alliance","tag-ankara","tag-bill","tag-broadcaster","tag-budapest","tag-case","tag-cold","tag-cold-war","tag-debate","tag-delay","tag-diplomat","tag-eu","tag-european","tag-february","tag-finland","tag-foreign-minister","tag-government","tag-hungary","tag-invasion","tag-jens-stoltenberg","tag-kurdish","tag-law","tag-military","tag-minor","tag-mps","tag-n","tag-nato","tag-negotiations","tag-neutrality","tag-one","tag-parliament","tag-president","tag-prime-minister","tag-ratification","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-security","tag-sweden","tag-swedish","tag-terrorist","tag-turkey","tag-twitter","tag-ukraine","tag-university","tag-us","tag-viktor-orban","tag-war","tag-who","tag-x"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41344,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41342\/revisions\/41344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}