Turkey will not agree to Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this at a press conference on Monday. According to him, negotiations by the two Scandinavian countries are of no use to Turkey: “Swedish and Finnish delegations do not have to make an effort to come to Turkey to convince us,” international news agencies quote Erdogan as saying. All thirty NATO member states must agree to the application before joining.
On Friday, Erdogan said he was already “not positive” about the pending applications for NATO membership by Finland and Sweden. He believes that both countries are too sympathetic to the Gülen movement, which is blamed for the failed coup in Turkey in 2016, and the Kurdish terrorist group PKK. Erdogan called the accession of neighboring Greece to NATO in 1952 a mistake: “we don’t want to make another mistake like that”.
During talks around the meeting of the thirty NATO foreign ministers in Berlin last weekend, the parties seemed to have come closer. On Saturday, Finnish Minister Pekka Haavisto said he is “certain” that Finland and Turkey can reach an agreement on accession. On Sunday, Finland announced that it would formally apply for membership, closely followed by Sweden. On Monday, the Swedish Foreign Ministry said it plans to travel with Finland to Turkey to discuss joining NATO. Erdogan says he is not open to that now.
This article is also part of our live blog: Swedish government formally decides to apply for NATO membership