Sweden still hopes to join NATO by the alliance’s Vilnius summit in July, Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said on Friday.
“We should be able to be members before then and it is the government’s ambition that we should be,” he told a news conference. NATO membership has so far been thwarted by objections from Turkey and Hungary, with Budapest citing complaints about Swedish criticism of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s record on democracy and the rule of law.
On Tuesday (23), Orbán was at the Qatar Economic Forum and said that his country’s relations with Sweden need to improve before the Nordic country’s candidacy for NATO is approved, he said.
There is still no date for the Hungarian parliament to vote on the Swedish candidacy for admission, which needs to be ratified by all 30 existing members. Like Sweden, Finland applied to join the military alliance last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Finns were accepted quickly.
(Posted by Fábio Mendes, with information from Reuters)
Source: CNN Brasil
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