Turkey is also promising to move on Sweden’s alliance application.
If you want to join NATO, come and talk to me — that’s Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s latest message to his Swedish counterpart.
“Today I sent an invitation letter to Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson … for a visit to Hungary to negotiate on Sweden’s NATO accession,” Orbán tweeted today.
Orbán’s remarks come amid growing signs that Sweden is possibly making inroads persuading the alliance’s last two holdouts — Hungary and Turkey — 20 months after it submitted a bid to join NATO and breaking its centuries-old tradition of neutrality thanks to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
I’m glad it’s moving forward (albeit glacially), but Turkey and Hungary are going to be the poster children for bad-faith actors in the context of both NATO and the EU for a very long time after this. Watching this constantly stall for over a year and a half - specifically due to absolute nonsense objections from those two - has been excruciating.