10/23/2023 6:30 pm (current 10/23/2023 6:40 pm)
The accession protocol is signed ©APA/AFP
After months of tug of war, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented Sweden’s request for NATO membership to parliament 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 conservative-Islamic alliance, AKP, has a majority in parliament.
MPs plan to meet in Ankara on Tuesday, but it was initially unclear whether the request would be discussed then. Turkey blocked Sweden’s membership of NATO for months, justifying this with what it considered to be Sweden’s inadequate deployment against “terrorist organizations”. Ankara is mainly concerned about the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party PKK and the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.
Erdogan’s approval is now a surprise. Recently, negotiations on this issue with Sweden were considered to be at an impasse. In fact, the Turkish blockade appeared 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 quickly as possible, in a meeting with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. to be presented to the Turkish Parliament. Since then, however, that has not happened – until Monday.
Kristersson now described as “pleasant” the news that Erdogan had presented the ratification document to the Turkish parliament. It is now up to Parliament to deal with the issue of Sweden’s membership in NATO. “We look forward to becoming a member of NATO,” Kristersson said on Twitter (X).
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 light of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Sweden applied to join NATO together with Finland 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 to Sweden’s membership – Turkey and Hungary remain missing. If the Turkish parliament readily agrees, Sweden’s inclusion in the defense alliance will ultimately depend on Hungary.