The NATO membership of Finland and Sweden will not progress in Turkey in the near future. There seems to be a wait of at least a couple of months ahead.
Tom Kankkonen, foreign journalist
15:45•Updated 15:54
Can the president hanged in Stockholm Recep Tayyip Erdoğan performing puppet will stop Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership?
You can’t, but it is starting to look clear that the confirmation of the countries’ NATO membership in Turkey will remain until after the Turkish elections.
Turkey reacted strongly to the Erdoğan doll hanging from his feet. The background of last week’s puppet seizure is a group that supports the Syrian Kurds and opposes Sweden’s NATO membership.
Speaker of the Swedish Parliament by Andreas Norlén The trip to Turkey was canceled and so was the speaker Matti Vanhanen trip. The purpose was to fly to Turkey on a Swedish government plane.
Representatives of President Erdoğan’s administration lined up to condemn the puppet protest. In addition, some of them presented new, apparently unrealistic demands. According to one politician, Sweden should hand over the perpetrators of the doll abduction to Turkey. The requirement is of course completely impossible to fulfill.
A calm Erdoğan comment on the matter (you will be transferred to another service) on Sunday and stated that relations with Sweden will only get worse if the “provocations” are not addressed.
Erdoğan also threw on the table of the new-sounding number of people to be handed over. According to the Turkish president, as a condition for NATO membership, Finland and Sweden should hand over around 130 “terrorists”.
Erdoğan himself has thrown many numbers into the air. At one point, there were 73 extradited people in Sweden alone, and at least once Erdoğan has talked about a hundred extradited people.
The president of Turkey has also decided, based on his speeches, that the journalist who received asylum in Sweden Bülent Kenesin posting to Turkey is a prerequisite for NATO membership.
Keneş once worked after being accused of the 2016 coup attempt Fethullah Gülen in a nearby magazine. The Swedish Supreme Court has rejected Turkey’s extradition request, but that has not stopped Erdoğan from returning to the matter.
Most extradition requests concern those accused of membership in the Gülen movement or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Turkish criteria For the NATO membership of Finland and Sweden, they look quite detailed. When the countries applied for membership, few expected that the representatives of Finland and Sweden would sit in the meeting rooms listening to Turkey’s demands for sending individual people to Turkey.
In Turkey’s opinion, everything is based on the ambiguous document of understanding signed during the NATO summit in Madrid. It could be that the Swedish and Finnish foreign ministries are already silently cursing the whole paper into the ground.
At this point one time window is closing, which means that ratification will hardly happen before the Turkish parliamentary and presidential elections. They will probably be held in May or June.
Spokesperson and key advisor to President Erdoğan Ibrahim Kalın stated on Saturday that the Turkish parliament will hardly have time to deal with the ratification before the election break.
According to Kalın, events like the puppet incident slow down the process, and Turkey wants to see how the changes in Sweden’s anti-terrorist legislation progress.
President Erdoğan has also painted himself into a corner with his repeated public demands for extradition. It is hard to see how the tough handover talks could be forgotten overnight.
However, the central media in Turkey are controlled by the government, so if necessary, black will turn into white.
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