Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan receives Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson on Tuesday on a "critical" day for NATO expansion, according to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavusoglu.
Turkey and Hungary have insisted since May on blocking the Atlanticist candidacy of Sweden and Finland, approved by the other 28 members of the military alliance. Although Erdogan surprised at the NATO summit in Madrid in June by lifting his veto in exchange for certain promises by the Nordic candidates, these have not materialized in a substantive way, from Ankara's point of view.
Turkey accuses Helsinki, and particularly Stockholm, of harboring fugitive militants of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its Syrian affiliate (YPG). Also members of the brotherhood of Fethullah Gülen, convicted in Turkey of coup plotting.
However, the new conservative Swedish government seems more inclined than its Social Democratic predecessor to turn words into deeds. This would be demonstrated by statements last week, both by his prime minister and the foreign minister, in the line of cutting off any dialogue with the YPG.
Kristersson arrived in Ankara last night from the Sharm el Sheikh Climate Summit. The ground has been paved for him by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who last Thursday met behind closed doors with Erdogan in Istanbul. Stoltenberg then stated that "the time has come to open the doors to Sweden and Finland, to send a clear message to Russia." Something that was taken badly by Erdogan's partner in government, the far-right Devlet Bahçeli: "he has come to give orders to the Parliament of Turkey."
The trilateral mechanism established in Madrid has held only one meeting, in Helsinki, and will soon hold another in Stockholm. Despite an improvement in the climate of dialogue, this has so far resulted in only one extradition, of a person accused of fraud. For what Erdogan has already said three times in the last month, in parliament, that there will be no unlocking as long as the governments of Sweden and Finland do not fulfill their promises. The fight against the PKK is not a conjunctural issue but an existential one, regardless of who rules in Ankara.
Likewise, Turkey denounces that, while Stockholm vetoed by law the export of weapons to the Turkish army, it supplied weapons to the subsidiary of an organization considered terrorist by the EU. Although Ankara has been unable to prevent other NATO countries from doing the same, it has decided to use the two Nordic countries to send a message of strength.
Sweden, whose traditional generosity towards political exiles is known and appreciated by dozens of countries, is also home to a large Kurdish community - from Turkey as well as Syria, Iraq and Iran - with many councilors and MPs and considerable political influence and public presence. .
Given that Turkey will soon enter the pre-electoral phase, the expansion may have to wait "until the second half of 2023," according to Carlos III University professor Ilke Toygür. Turkey's blocking capacity is one of the cards Erdogan is playing, which sees Western pressure increasing due to its special relationship with Russia. At the same time, Joe Biden's promises to unblock the sale of F-16 fighters to Turkey have not materialized.
