(Istanbul) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned on Wednesday that Turkey will not necessarily “meet” the “expectations” of Sweden, a candidate for NATO membership, at the Atlantic Alliance summit in July.
“Sweden has expectations, but that does not mean that we will meet them,” said Mr. Erdogan, who has been blocking Sweden’s entry into NATO for thirteen months, criticizing him in particular for his leniency towards Kurdish refugee militants. on his floor.
“For us to be able to meet these expectations, Sweden must first do its part,” added the head of state, re-elected at the end of May for a third term, to the attention of journalists present at board his plane on his return from an official visit to Azerbaijan.
A tripartite meeting between Turkey, Sweden and Finland is taking place in parallel on Wednesday in Ankara to discuss Sweden’s NATO membership project.
“Progress has been made,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, for whom “it remains possible to reach an agreement by the summit” of the Atlantic Alliance scheduled for Vilnius (Lithuania ) on July 11 and 12.
In early June in Istanbul, Mr. Stoltenberg called on Turkey to ratify Sweden’s membership of the Alliance “as soon as possible”, considering that it had “fulfilled its obligations”.
But an anti-Erdogan demonstration and against this membership took place simultaneously in Stockholm, including in particular the Rojava committee, which supports the Kurdish armed groups in Syria, enemies of Ankara.
“We cannot look at this positively […] What do (Swedish) law enforcement do? Their job is to stop them,” Erdogan said on Wednesday.
“If you don’t take care of this, we cannot (say yes) to Vilnius”, he insisted, while a law toughening anti-terrorism legislation, which came into force on 1er June in Sweden, should make it easier to prosecute groups considered to be “terrorists”.
“Terrorists”
Turkey, which gave the green light at the end of March to Finland’s entry into the Alliance, is the only one of the 31 NATO member states with Hungary to have not yet ratified Swedish membership. The Hungarian Parliament is due to suspend its work on July 7, four days before the Vilnius summit.
The Swedish government announced on Monday the extradition to Turkey of a supporter of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), convicted in Turkey of drug trafficking, responding de facto to a condition set by Ankara for the entry of Sweden in NATO.
But the Turkish authorities are demanding dozens of extraditions of refugee activists in Sweden whom they describe as “terrorists”, a request impossible to satisfy according to the Swedish executive, the independent courts having the last word on these files.
Sweden and Finland announced in May 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, their candidacy for NATO.
After decades of neutrality, then of military non-alignment since the end of the Cold War, the two Nordic countries have considered the security balance created by the fall of the USSR to be obsolete, making it essential in their eyes to benefit from the pact of NATO mutual protection.