Finland and Sweden have announced they’re submitting their
NATO membership applications, which they will do on May 18. The following day,
President Niinistö of Finland and Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of
Sweden will travel to Washington for meetings with, among others, President
Biden. NATO member states are enthusiastically welcoming the two siblings. But
Turkey is delivering an unexpected and thorny complication involving Sweden’s
bid.

The press conference at which Niinistö and Andersson announced that
their two countries’ applications were about to be submitted was yet another
demonstration of impressive unity. Niinistö even conducted his part in
Swedish—not a mean feat given that he’s a native Finnish speaker and given the
extreme sensitivity of the issue at hand. But when a Swedish journalist asked about
Turkey’s recent statements that it has serious concerns about Finland’s and
Sweden’s applications, Niinistö admitted that he had been “rather surprised” to
hear the statements.

He could have said “rather annoyed,” because Turkey’s intervention concerns mostly Sweden—yet it throws a spanner in the works of both countries’ NATO membership applications. “We will not say ‘yes’ to those [countries] who apply sanctions to Turkey to join security organisation NATO,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a news conference on May 16. He was referring to Sweden’s 2019 decision to suspend arms sales to Turkey. Turkey also alleges that Finland and Sweden host members of “terror groups” such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). “Neither of the countries have a clear stance against terror organizations,” Erdogan said. “How can we trust them?”

Regardless of where one stands on the issue of the PKK, it is true that Sweden in particular has, over the decades, granted asylum to numerous members of the PKK. It is also true that Sweden’s current government is a weak one-party government composed of Social Democrats, which relies on the support of a wafer-thin parliamentary majority of one. That one person is an independent who previously represented the Left Party. Her name is Amineh Kakabaveh, and she happens to an Iranian-born Kurdish activist who came to Sweden as a teenager and is one of the people Erdogan considers terrorists. In 2021, the Social Democrats—in an apparent attempt to keep Kakabaveh on their side—announced that they would strengthen their links with the PYD, the Syrian branch of the PKK.

Now Kakabaveh is extremely unhappy. In a string of media interviews, she has accused Erdogan of singling her out and of wanting to silence her, and the Swedish government of giving in to Erdogan—and she’s withdrawn her support from the government. While leading Sweden’s historic NATO application bid, Andersson thus faces the massive domestic challenge of leading a government that lacks majority support in parliament.

The government is now said to be working out a deal with
some of the opposition parties to secure some kind of working order. The
opposition—primarily composed of center-right parties that support NATO
membership—certainly wants the application process to proceed without disruption.
But there’s a further twist: They’re in the midst of an election campaign. In
September, Sweden elects a new parliament. The opposition, many of whose
parliamentarians have been waiting for NATO membership for many years, would
certainly like to serve in the government that gets to lead Sweden into NATO after
Turkey no doubt becomes the final member state to ratify Sweden’s (and
Finland’s) accession.

The Nordic NATO announcements, involving a combination of Niinistö, Andersson, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, and a changing cast of ministers, look serene, united, and harmonious. But on the Swedish side, the NATO application has brought plenty of drama from unexpected quarters.

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