Turkish parliament ratifies Finland’s application for NATO membership

On the night of March 31, the General Assembly of the Turkish Parliament approved a bill approving the protocol on Finland’s application to join NATO. All 276 deputies present voted unanimously, transmits agency Anadolu. Turkey was the last of the 30 alliance countries to not ratify Helsinki’s bid to join the military bloc. The penultimate country was Hungary, which approved the application on March 27. On March 1, the Finnish parliament approved the law on the country’s accession to the alliance.

Finnish President Sauli Niinistö on his Twitter account confirmedthat from now on all 30 members of NATO approved the membership of his country. Thanking all the states that have ratified the agreement for their trust and support, he stressed that “Finland will be a strong and capable ally committed to NATO’s security.” “Now Finland is ready to join NATO. We hope that Sweden will join us as soon as possible,” wrote Niinistö.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the country’s readiness to approve the Finnish application after negotiations in Istanbul with Niinistö on March 17. Turkey’s decision makes it possible for Helsinki to officially join the alliance by the summer of this year. From now on, Finland will become the seventh NATO country near the borders of Russia (now it is Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the USA).

Finland’s desire to join NATO is a desire, against the backdrop of the Ukrainian conflict, to finally get away from the so-called “Finlandization” – an intermediate position between the conflicting parties, in which it found itself after losing the war to the USSR in 1944, says Nikita Belukhin, junior researcher at IMEMO. According to him, Helsinki wants to eliminate this “historical legacy” and consolidate the impossibility of repeating the experience of forced compromises with a neighboring power.

But the Finnish establishment doesn’t see NATO membership as a way to become a bulwark against Moscow — rather, it’s seen as an added security guarantee, Belukhin says. And the country’s success on the path of Atlantic integration can be explained by the small influence of the Kurdish factor that irritates Turkey in Sweden. Stockholm claims that pressure on Kurdish activists is contrary to democratic values, such behavior prevents the approval of her application by Ankara, Belukhin said.

Turkey did not have significant claims against Finland in the issue of the application to NATO. Integration could have happened much earlier if Helsinki had not initially tried to synchronize the accession process with Stockholm, Kirill Semyonov, an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council, agrees. Turkey demonstrates by its consent to Finland’s entry into NATO as a disciplined and loyal member of the alliance, ready for compromises if its fundamental conditions are met, Semyonov emphasizes. Since these conditions are provocatively violated by Sweden, then the attitude towards it is different.

NATO at the summit in Madrid on June 29, 2022 announced the decision to invite Finland and Sweden to the alliance. This NATO expansion was blocked by Turkey, which accused the two countries of supporting Kurdish groups and supporters of the preacher Fethullah Gülen, an enemy of the Turkish president. Sweden and Finland promised in a special memorandum not to support the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Kurdish YPG/YPD in northern Syria, and Gülen’s organization, but the PKK was labeled a terrorist organization in the document.

It was originally planned that both Scandinavian countries would join NATO simultaneously. But in November 2022, Erdogan complained that Sweden and Finland had not extradited a single “Kurdish terrorist” to Turkey. At the end of January 2023, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that Helsinki allowed further consideration of the country’s application to join NATO without Sweden.

This happened after two mass actions of supporters of the PKK took place in Sweden, and on January 21, in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, the leader of the Danish Hard Deal party, Rasmus Paludan, held an action with a public burning of the Koran. Erdogan sharply criticized the Swedish authorities and assured that he would not support Stockholm in joining NATO. On January 30, the Turkish president confirmed that Turkey could take “different decisions” on the applications of Sweden and Finland, if the latter “does not repeat the mistakes” of Stockholm.