Turkey treats Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership applications differently.
President Sauli Niinistö and the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will meet tomorrow, Friday, in Ankara, the capital of Turkey.
Turkey is expected to ratify Finland’s NATO membership before its elections in May.
Turkey, on the other hand, is still pledging the acceptance of Sweden’s application.
In this article, Turkey expert, senior researcher at the Foreign Policy Institute Toni Alaranta answers questions about Turkey’s different attitude towards Finland and Sweden.
1. Why does Turkey handle Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO applications differently?
The basic reason is probably that there is a strong perception in Turkey that Sweden is some kind of European safe haven for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.
How reality-based the perception is is not relevant here, but the fact that this is how people think in Turkey.
Another reason is that Turkey now clearly needed to send some kind of positive signal in the direction of Western countries.
There has been very strong criticism that Turkey is playing tricks because it wants to please Russia. Now, by confirming Finland’s NATO membership, this criticism can be softened a little.
2. What things separated the acceptance of Finland and Sweden in the eyes of Turkey?
Publicly, Turkey has presented a few reasons.
The first point seems to be the attitude towards the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK. Turkey still demands stronger measures from Sweden. There are accusations that the organization is financed from Sweden and that PKK activists are able to operate too freely in Sweden.
At least at this point, Finland is no longer being blamed in the same way for this matter.
Another issue is that the Koran burning episode in Stockholm caused widespread indignation in Turkey, and it made a clear distinction that this is not possible in Finland and pointed to the fact that Finland has different legislation.
The third point is that especially the previous administration in Sweden had quite a lot of dealings with the Kurdish administration operating on the Syrian side, which belongs to the Kurdistan Labor Party party family. Sweden supported it spectacularly. This caused a lot of indignation in Turkey.
The fourth thing is perhaps that historically the relations between Turkey and Finland have been quite good. The situation in Sweden is a bit different.
In the 1960s and 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, very right-wing regimes supported by the army were in power in Turkey, which acted quite harshly against various left-wing groups of Kurds and Turks.
From the 60s and 70s, these left-wing actors have applied to Sweden, and Sweden has offered them political asylum. From there, Turkey’s idea that Sweden offers a home to the enemies of the Turkish state is inherited.
3. What is Turkey’s most important demand for Sweden?
It seems to be aimed at the fact that new legislation related to terrorist crimes has now been introduced in Sweden.
In Turkey, there is now a lot of emphasis that within the framework of the new law, there must be some concrete evidence that Sweden takes the PKK issue more seriously than before.
Obviously, the question is whether the new legislation will be able to eradicate, for example, the financing of the PKK from Sweden. This has happened over the years, but only the Swedish security authorities have accurate information on the matter.
Possibly, the public use of PKK symbols, waving the PKK flag and things of this type also come into question. These are probably being watched in Turkey.
The legislation is of course not retroactive. That is, it cannot intervene in any previous matters.
In Sweden, producing possible new judgments takes time. There will hardly be any example cases in the short term.
4. When could Turkey ratify Sweden’s NATO application?
It’s pretty much impossible to say. Here it must be noted that the question has never been solely about what Sweden and Finland do or fail to do.
Turkey has also clearly used this teasing as a pressure card for the United States, which finances Kurdish groups in Syria. In addition, Turkey and the United States have many other mutual disputes.
In this way, President Erdoğan has been able to keep these issues as if they were on the common agenda of NATO. Now then, the pressure will probably increase if this matter continues to drag on with regard to Sweden.
I think it will also be affected by how Erdoğan’s own power structures look like in Turkey after the mid-May elections and what the situation is with the United States. The timetable for how Sweden’s NATO application will probably consist of all these issues.
You can discuss the topic on Friday 17.3. until 11 p.m.