The results of that conversion after Turkey’s parliamentary elections scheduled for mid-May are uncertain, said Paul Levin, director of Stockholm University’s Institute of Turkish Studies.
“Now we can probably talk about Turkish ratification before the elections, which seem to be scheduled for May 14,” Levin told AFP.
“What happens after that depends in part on who wins. “
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s objections to Sweden’s NATO club are based largely on Stockholm’s refusal to extradite Turkish citizens whom Ankara needs to prosecute for “terrorism. “
And Erdogan is for re-election.
In December, Sweden extradited a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to Turkey. He had been convicted by a Turkish court and denied asylum in Sweden.
Erdogan more action from Stockholm against the PKK, listed as a terrorist organization through Turkey and its Western allies.
“On the one hand, there is a Turkish president who has jailed thousands of other people for alleged insults and needs to divert attention from a poor economy in the months leading up to the election,” Levin said.
“On the other hand, there are teams in Sweden that oppose the NATO club and PKK supporters are worried about the government’s promises to persecute them,” he said.
Levin said those PKK supporters had learned that they could simply galvanize Erdogan by “insulting him and thus blocking the accession process. “
A demonstration by a far-right politician outside Turkey’s embassy in Stockholm on Saturday, authorized by police, further strained relations.
Rasmus Paludan is a Swedish-Danish activist who has already been convicted of racist insults.
He provoked riots in Sweden the year he toured the country and publicly burned copies of the Koran.
On Saturday, he burned a copy of the Muslim holy book after a nearly hour-long speech denouncing Islam.
The police resolved to allow the demonstration on the basis of Sweden’s liberal constitution, which protects the right to demonstrate.
Ankara summoned Sweden’s ambassador to put on record its outrage and then canceled a stopover by Swedish Defense Minister Pal Johnson that was scheduled for next Friday in Ankara, a rare high-level meeting.
Earlier this month, Ankara’s ambassador Sweden after pro-Kurdish activists hung an effigy of Erdogan on his feet, explicitly comparing him to Benito Mussolini.
Italy’s fascist dictator was turned upside down after his execution in the final days of World War II.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson denounced it as a move to sabotage the country’s candidacy for the NATO club, but provoked a backlash from some in Sweden who protect the right to freedom of expression.
Then, last week, the leader of Sweden’s far-right democrats, Jimmie Akesson, who is backed by the Swedish government, denounced Erdogan as an “Islamist dictator. “
He suggested Kristersson not appease Turkey “because in the end it is an anti-democratic formula and a dictator that we are dealing with,” Akesson told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
Turkey is the extradition of other Kurdish “terrorists” based in Sweden. Erdogan recently said there are as many as 130.
Stockholm has made it clear that the courts have the final say, but this seems to have angered Ankara.
Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, who spoke last spring of an accelerated accession procedure of just a few weeks, told AFP in January that he still believed he would do so in 2023, even if he doesn’t say so.
Turkey and Hungary have to ratify the candidacy, he stressed.
The two countries have maintained ties with Russia since their invasion of Ukraine, and Ankara assumed the role of mediator between the two sides.
A spark of hope for Sweden is that Finland, which also submitted its NATO bid after the Russian invasion, has made it clear that it needs to enter the alliance without its “big brother. “