Yes to Finland, no to Sweden. A Solomonic Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened last night in a televised message to open the doors of NATO to the first of the Nordic countries, while keeping them closed to his neighbor. The Turkish president thus reacts to the “provocations” registered two weekends ago in Stockholm, “against Turkey and Islam”, according to him.
These, in fact, led the Finnish Foreign Minister himself, Pekka Haavisto, to declare on Tuesday that his country’s candidacy for the Atlantic Alliance was no longer necessarily coupled with that of Sweden, as had been the case until then.
“We could send Finland a different message, much to the chagrin of Sweden,” Erdogan hinted on Sunday. “As long as Finland doesn’t make the same mistakes.” This Monday, his Foreign Minister, Mevlüt Çavu?o?lu, has abounded in the same vein: “It would be fair to separate between a problematic country and another that is less so.”
Two Saturdays ago, Sweden hosted two events specifically designed to torpedo its own NATO candidacy, which requires unanimity from all member countries but has not been ratified by Turkey or Hungary. On the one hand, a huge police device protected the integrity of a marginal far-right politician so that he could burn a Koran in front of the Turkish embassy. That same afternoon, a part of the abundant Kurdish exile in Sweden (from Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria) marched against the approach to Turkey, trampling on portraits of the Turkish head of state.
Ankara rejects Stockholm’s arguments about “freedom of expression” and considers buried the conciliatory gestures that had reached it so far from the new conservative Swedish government. In fact, the current Swedish negotiator with NATO had recently declared on public radio -according to the Turkish agency Anadolu- that meeting some of the Turkish demands “redundated in Sweden’s own security, given the funding of the Workers’ Party of the Kurdistan (PKK) through extortion and drug trafficking in our country.”
But Erdogan is adamant: “We gave Sweden a list of 120 terrorists to extradite. If they don’t, that’s theirs.” An added obstacle is the proximity of the Turkish presidential and legislative elections, called for May 14.
It should be said that neither the government alliance nor the alliance of six opposition parties come to them with any specific plan for the Kurdish-majority southeast, where the vast majority of mayors elected under the acronym of the revolutionary left have been dismissed by the judges “for links to the PKK”.
