Sweden one step closer towards NATO membership

Reuters

Sweden got closer to NATO membership after the Turkish parliament approved the Scandinavian country's application late Tuesday.

"Today, we are one step closer to full NATO membership. It is positive that Turkey's parliament has voted for approval of Sweden's NATO application," Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on X, formerly Twitter, immediately after the vote of 287-55 came out in the Turkish parliament.

Applauding the outcome, Sweden's Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said in an interview with Swedish Television (SVT) that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan still had to sign the ratification and send the document to Washington D.C.

Mats Knutson, Sweden's domestic political commentator, said in an opinion piece on SVT that Erdogan may not sign it off before Washington has confirmed that they will sell fighter jets to Turkey.

The process has so far taken 20 months since Sweden applied for membership, although NATO's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg assured the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in March 2022 that Sweden would likely join the military alliance "very quickly."

Instead, Sweden has encountered hurdles with Ankara citing concerns regarding Sweden supporting the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Syria's Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey considers as terrorist groups, and Sweden allowing protesters to burn copies of the Quran even outside Turkey's embassy in Stockholm.

In April 2023, Finland became a NATO member, crushing the ambition of the Swedish and Finnish governments to join "hand-in-hand" as they deemed it safest in the wake of Russia launching its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022.

Although Sweden formally applied for NATO membership in May 2022, it wasn't until March 2023 that the Swedish parliament voted in favor of abandoning the country's long-standing policy of military non-alignment.

Out of eight political parties in the parliament, only two smaller ones were opposed to a NATO membership and the voting ended with 269 in favor and 37 against.

According to a poll by the University of Gothenburg, public opinion also shifted quickly in 2022. In 2022, 64 percent were positive about joining NATO – an increase of 35 percentage points from the year before.

Though statements by the Swedish government were initially optimistic about joining NATO soon, they have become increasingly less so over time.

That said, Sweden has intensified its cooperation with and integration into the military alliance.

In January, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told delegates of an annual security policy conference that Sweden was prepared to send "a reduced battalion" to Latvia to strengthen NATO's presence along the Russian border once Sweden has become a member.

Sweden is also widely regarded as an important staging area where NATO wants to boost, and in December 2023 Sweden and the United States signed a Defence Cooperation Agreement according to which the United States is granted access to 17 military bases across the country.

The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society and the Swedish section of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War have criticized the position of Sweden, unlike Denmark and Norway, not ruling out storing nuclear weapons on its territory.

"In a similar agreement between Norway and the United States, it is stated that Norway does not accept the pre-storage or exercises with nuclear weapons on its territory, a clause not included in the Swedish agreement with the United States," the organizations wrote in a report released in January.

"It is frightening that we are joining a nuclear weapons alliance without the Swedish people knowing what it will entail. There are also many question marks about what role Sweden will take within NATO. We hope that this report can shine a light on what membership in the nuclear weapons alliance may entail, even though the questions are still worryingly many," Kerstin Bergea, chairperson of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society said in a press release when the report was made public.

For Now, Hungary is the only one of NATO's 31 member states whose parliament, now in recess, has not ratified Sweden's NATO bid.

Hungary has made clear that it will not be the last country to ratify Sweden's accession, and on Tuesday Kristersson received an invitation for negotiations in Budapest from Prime Minister Viktor Orban, local media reported.

Billstrom, however, rejected the need for further negotiations with Hungary, Aftonbladet newspaper reported.

"I see no need for negotiations at this stage," Billstrom was quoted as saying when he met journalists on Tuesday.