Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has submitted a bill approving Sweden’s membership to parliament for ratification removing one of the final hurdles blocking the Scandinavian country from joining the military alliance.
The move on Monday was in line with a commitment Erdoğan made at NATO’s July summit. The bill’s passage through parliament should be a formality. Erdoğan held out on Sweden’s application to extract concessions from the US, including the sale of F-16s to Ankara, a deal that has been held up in the US Senate.
The Turkish leader has also been demanding that Sweden tighten up on the extradition of Kurdish asylum seekers living in Sweden. Turkish officials have insisted the steps Sweden had taken to clamp down on the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party militia were insufficient.
In a sign of real movement, the Turkish parliament on Monday moved the accession bill forward.
Turkey and Hungary are the only NATO members whose legislatures have yet to sign off on Sweden’s accession.
The Hungarian leadership, closely aligned with Ankara and maintains a relationship with Moscow, has dragged its feet, saying it is only a “technical” issue, but also complaining that Sweden had criticized the state of Hungarian democracy.
Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, immediately welcomed Monday’s move and said Stockholm was looking forward to becoming a NATO member. “Now it remains for the parliament to deal with the question,” Kristersson wrote on X.
Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO last year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finland joined in April in what was a major expansion of the alliance, but Sweden’s bid is, in some respects, the more important.
