Following 18 months of waiting due to a litany of delays by Ankara, which has sought so-called ‘terror-related’ concessions from Stockholm, Sweden must now wait a little longer before it joins the NATO military alliance after the foreign affairs commission of the Turkish parliament on Thursday, November 16th opted to postpone a vote on Sweden’s membership.
Fuat Oktay, who chairs the foreign affairs commission controlled by President Erdoğan’s ruling neo-Ottoman Justice and Development Party (AKP), said that discussions concerning Sweden’s accession into the Atlanticist military alliance would continue and mentioned the possibility of reintroducing the bill to the agenda next week, The Financial Times reports.
In its motion to postpone the bill, the commission cited the need for clarification on some issues and that certain negotiations with Sweden had not “progressed” sufficiently.
Oktay, however, did not lay out a specific timeline for when that might occur, leaving many speculating just how much longer Sweden will have to wait, and what Erdoğan’s party’s motivations for further delaying the process may have been.
Speaking to members of the press after the parliamentary debate, Oktay said: “For all of our lawmakers to approve Sweden’s NATO membership, they need to be fully convinced. We will discuss all of these in our (next) commission meeting [on the issue].”
He noted that Sweden’s ambassador to Turkey could be summoned to the upcoming session to provide lawmakers with additional details on the measures taken by his country to address Turkey’s security concerns.
While Erdoğan signed the Protocol on Sweden’s NATO Accession late last month, Turkish officials have continued to state that the Swedish government has not sufficiently addressed Turkish concerns related to Kurdish armed groups.
Ali Sahin, an AKP lawmaker, said to Reuters,
I value NATO’s enlargement. However, we must remove some of the controversies in our minds. Sweden has become a safe haven, or a heaven, for some terrorist organisations. We find the steps Sweden has taken until now valuable, but we don’t find them sufficient.
Kürşad Zorlu, a lawmaker from the Iyi party, expressed similar concerns. On X, he said. “We will continue to protect the interests of our country.”
The umpteenth delay comes after Erdoğan at the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July pledged to approve Sweden’s accession. However, since then, the Turkish leader has continued to drag his feet, delaying the process again and again, presumably in an attempt to squeeze as many concessions out of Sweden and other Western countries as possible.
Swedish news agency TT reports that the postponed decision is related to Turkey’s desire to acquire F-16 fighter jets from the United States, a purchase that has to be approved by the U.S. Congress, which has yet to put the issue on its agenda.
Sweden’s Foreign Minister Tobias Billström declined to comment on the Turkish delay when approached by Swedish media. Morgan Johansson, spokesman on foreign relations for the opposition party the Social Democrats, said in an interview with state-run Sveriges Radio that he found the developments “very serious and, I think, also surprising” and questioned whether Turkey had put forward new demands of the Swedish government.
An anonymous source in the U.S. State Department said Turkey was “very interested” in coming to a final ratification before the NATO foreign ministers meet in Brussels at the end of this month.
