Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan arrives for the NATO summit in Madrid, Spain on June 29, 2022.
Nacho Doche | Reuters
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dealt another blow to Sweden’s bid for NATO membership, suggesting his government could approve Finland’s bid for NATO membership without its northern neighbor.
Finland and Sweden formally applied to join the 73-year-old defense alliance last May, reversing their long-standing policy of non-alignment following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The two vowed to move forward in tandem.
Erdogan, angry with Sweden’s government for a number of reasons, is poised to make or break both countries’ plans to join NATO, as each country’s bid requires unanimous approval from all 30 current members. Hungary is the only country besides Turkey that has not yet approved the applications of the Nordic countries, which the other member states want to speed up.
“We can send Finland a different message [on their application], and Sweden will be shocked to see our message. But Finland must not make the same mistake that Sweden did,” Erdogan said during a speech on Sunday.
The comments come days after Erdogan threatened Sweden’s NATO membership over a Koran burning by right-wing extremists outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, which Swedish authorities condemned but said was legal under free speech laws On the side.
“Those who allow such blasphemy in front of our embassy can no longer expect our support for their NATO membership,” Erdogan said on January 23.
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde and Finland’s Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto attend a press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg after signing their countries’ accession protocols at the alliance’s headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, July 5, 2022.
Yves Herman | Reuters
Turkey’s hostility towards Sweden centers mainly on Sweden’s support for Kurdish groups that Ankara considers terrorist or extremist-linked, and on the arms embargo that both Sweden and Finland, along with other EU countries, impose on Turkey for targeting it to the Kurdish militias in Syria.
Finland lifted its nearly three-year-old arms embargo against Turkey last week as part of efforts to improve relations between the two countries and move one step closer to winning its NATO bid.
But relations between Stockholm and Ankara currently show no signs of improvement.
Things became so heated after the Koran-burning episode in the Swedish capital and the anti-Erdogan protest by Kurdish activists there just days earlier that Finland’s foreign minister called for a “time-out” in talks with Turkey on the Nordic countries joining NATO.
“A time-out is needed before we go back to the trilateral talks and see where we stand when the dust settles from the current situation, so no conclusions should be drawn yet… I think there will be a break for a while a few weeks,” Pekka Haavisto told Reuters in an interview published on January 24.
Sweden’s leadership has bluntly said that it will not be able to fulfill all of Turkey’s demands. Meanwhile, Turkey presented it with a kind of deadline.
“Turkey is both confirming that we have done what we said we would do, but they are also saying that they want things that we cannot or do not want to give them,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristerson said in early January. However, he expressed confidence that Turkey will approve his country’s NATO bid.
Turkish President Ibrahim Kalin’s spokesman recently said Sweden has eight to 10 weeks to make the changes demanded by Ankara, as Turkey’s parliament may go into recess ahead of the country’s crucial May 14 presidential election. Sweden says it needs another six months to make these changes.
Finland has not yet commented on how the potential of it joining NATO without its neighbor and close ally Sweden might affect its plans to join the alliance.
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