Sweden and Finland today formally submitted in Brussels the request for accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels. And moments later, Turkey officially made it known that it was not willing to accept the entry of the Nordic countries if its concerns were not "heard".
It is not the first time that Istanbul has spoken of conditions for accepting the entry of Sweden and Finland into the Alliance, in particular its request that they end their policy of tolerance towards members of the Kurdish political exile, in particular the PKK (the Party of the Workers of Kurdistan).
What is new is that he has formulated his refusal within NATO, in a context in which the ambassadors of the countries involved have not been able to reach an agreement to quickly and immediately start accession discussions. Specifically, the Turkish ambassador to the Alliance has presented a series of demands that must be met.
Until today, the organization of which the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg is secretary general, hoped to quickly resolve the differences between the Nordic countries and Turkey. But now it is feared that the blockade could last longer than expected and prevent the "fast track" that the main allied countries, in particular the United States, had conceived for the new partners.
Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952. And like the rest of the thirty countries that make up the organization, it has the power to veto the entry of new partners. This is not the first time that Turkey has used this veto power. In the 1990s, Ankara tried to block Eastern countries from joining the organization to push for their speedy entry into the European Union. In 2009 he also tried to prevent the access of the Danish Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the head of the organization. In both cases it failed.
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