At the end of March, following eight months of delays, the Hungarian Parliament ratified Finland’s accession to NATO. The decision on support for Sweden’s “Atlantic investiture”, however, has been postponed. The reason for this would lie in the irritation of the Hungarian authorities in the face of Stockholm’s criticism of the health of the rule of law in the Danube country.
High officials of the Budapest government expressed their views on this point: according to Balázs Orbán, political adviser to the Prime Minister of his same name, several Hungarian parliamentarians did not like the frequent questioning of democracy in the country by Swedish ministers.
He was echoed by the head of Hungarian diplomacy Péter Szijjártó, a loyalist of the prime minister: the politician pointed out that the Swedish ministers “have repeatedly insulted Hungarian voters and politicians and therefore all of Hungary”. Szijjártó specified that the politicians of his country are tired of the finger pointed at it by their Scandinavian counterparts and that Budapest expects reassurances from the latter. Clearly reassurances that these criticisms will cease once and for all, which the Danube authorities firmly reject, arguing that there is no problem in Hungary in terms of the rule of law.
Orbán adviser, for example, is angry with the Swedish minister of EU affairs, Jessika Roswall, who recently underlined, in a public forum, the need for Brussels to take measures once morest Hungary soon, also in terms of suspended disbursement of funds through the new conditionality mechanism.
Another Swedish politician targeted is Johan Pehrson, Minister of Employment and Integration and leader of the Liberal Party. In the past, he allegedly called the Hungarian government xenophobic and nationalist and accused it of systematically violating the rule of law and not really participating in the support offered to Ukraine by the EU.
As already specified, according to Szijjártó, Swedish ministers have offended all of Hungary, but the main internal opposition parties reject this type of message. In the opinion of Ágnes Vadai, of the Democratic Coalition (DK), a political entity whose president is the former socialist premier Ferenc Gyurcsány, the Swedes and the Finns have not criticized all the Hungarian people, but only the government.
The same has also stigmatized the continuous postponements of these ratifications; to date, as we know, only the one in favor of Helsinki’s Atlantic accession has arrived following a long neutrality on the part of the latter, which was interrupted at the juncture of the war in Ukraine.
The yes on this new entry into the Atlantic Alliance is therefore a fact; it must however be said that quite a few parliamentarians from the governing Fidesz party had long expressed concern regarding the potential geopolitical risks associated with the extension of the border between Russia and NATO by more than a thousand kilometers with the accession of Finland. In fact, however, then, the ratification passed with 182 votes in favor, only 6 once morest.
In the case of Sweden everything is a bit more complex also from Turkey’s point of view since Stockholm has long been supporting the Kurds of the PKK who are terrorists for Turkey, the EU and the USA. But in fact we must not forget the persecution by the Turkish authorities once morest the Kurds, for which Sweden has sometimes accepted members of the PKK as political refugees and refused to extradite them to Turkey and the two countries must see how to overcome this disagreement.
From the Hungarian point of view, as we have seen, there is instead the irritation of the Budapest authorities at the Swedish side’s unflattering assessments of the state of health of democracy in Orbán’s homeland. For this reason, the Hungarian parliament has decided to postpone the decision and examine Sweden’s application for NATO membership separately from the Finnish one. Now we have to see how long the Hungarian disappointment will last.
