IT'S HIS WAR ON THE KURDS

Analysis-Erdogan thrusts NATO expansion issue into Turkey's tense election campaign

  


Thu, January 26, 2023 
By Huseyin Hayatsever, Birsen Altayli and Jonathan Spicer

ANKARA (Reuters) - Two provocative incidents in Stockholm this month have energised Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan ahead of tight elections and dimmed Sweden and Finland's hopes of joining NATO before the summer, diplomats, analysts and opposition politicians say.

Erdogan was quick to thrust the issue of NATO expansion into domestic politics after a copy of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, was burned at the weekend, and an effigy of the Turkish leader was strung from a lamppost a week earlier.

The incidents, while not illegal in Sweden, hobbled Stockholm's effort to win Ankara's support for its bid to join U.S.-led NATO, which Sweden made last May alongside Finland in the face of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

For Erdogan, it was an opportunity to rally support and distract from a cost-of-living crisis weighing on voters' minds, analysts said, with polls showing he could lose to some presidential challengers in the May 14 vote.

Facing his biggest political test in two decades in power, he took a stance that has proven effective before - criticising perceived Islamophobia in Europe and support for "members of terrorist organisations and enemies of Islam" in Sweden.

Leaders of the opposition alliance looking to topple Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK Party scrambled this week to fall in line with his view, and even take a harder line.

Meral Aksener, leader of the IYI Party, parliament's fourth-biggest, said it would take "an even more concrete step" and file a criminal complaint against both the Swedish government and perpetrators of the "vile act".

"Erdogan and his fellows want to use these foreign policy issues in general for domestic political gains," she told party members on Wednesday.

The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) also condemned the incidents in Sweden and said they would serve Erdogan's re-election campaign.

The Koran was set alight on Saturday by a far-right Danish politician, while earlier a pro-Kurdish group strung up the Erdogan effigy. Both incidents were criticised by Swedish government officials.

But Erdogan said this week that Sweden could no longer expect Turkey's support for its NATO bid, and Ankara cancelled a planned trilateral meeting. Finland said the sides need a "time out" for a few weeks until "the dust has settled".

WAITING GAME

All 30 NATO member states must approve newcomers.

To address Turkey's concerns, Sweden and Finland pledged last summer to take a harder line against what Ankara labels as mainly Kurdish "terrorists" - allegedly linked to PKK separatist militants in Turkey's southeast - living there.

Washington, Stockholm and Helsinki had hoped Ankara would ratify the NATO bids before Turkey's election. But that prospect faded even before the Stockholm protests, given Erdogan's calls for dozens of extraditions and deportations that Swedish law would not allow.

Ozer Sencar, chairman of pollster Metropoll, said that amplifying foreign policy and security issues ahead of elections allows Erdogan to consolidate his voter base.

He "creates a perception of a 'strong leader' inside Turkey," he said. "If you can come up with a security problem, then people rally behind the strong leader."

Both Swedish and Finnish officials have acknowledged that Turkey's reaction to their membership bids - and security concerns - has had domestic political dimensions.

"Of course they feel the pressure from the upcoming elections in mid-May and because of that the discussion understandably has become heated in many ways in Turkey," Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told Reuters.

He said Turkey is likely to ratify the Nordic countries' membership after the May presidential and parliamentary elections, and before a NATO summit in Vilnius on July 11-12.

But a Western diplomat who requested anonymity said the issue was "completely taken over by election politics" and that ratification could come as late as October, when the Turkish parliament reconvenes after the summer.

While Erdogan's government backs the Nordics' NATO bid with conditions, his political opponents had been more supportive - before the Stockholm incidents.

ECONOMY TRUMPS FOREIGN POLICY?

His AK Party, now the biggest, is likely to remain a powerful force in parliament after the elections, but opinion polls show Erdogan trailing some potential presidential challengers including CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and the popular mayors of Istanbul and Ankara.

Erdogan has sought to ease Turks' economic woes by delivering a large hike to the minimum wage this year and reducing the age limit for retirement for millions, among other fiscal stimulus measures.

But analysts say the economy will likely remain the determining factor for most voters rather than foreign policy.

Sinan Ulgen, director of the Istanbul-based Centre for Economic and Foreign Policy Studies and a former diplomat, noted that NATO enlargement is a non-partisan issue.

"This time the ruling and opposition parties have the same position on the (NATO Nordics) matter, so it does not seem to be a topic for domestic politics," he said.

(Writing by Huseyin Hayatsever and Ali Kucukgocmen, editing by Mark Heinrich)

Why Turkey is blocking NATO's expansion

Joel Mathis, Contributing Writer
Thu, January 26, 2023 

Turkey, Finland, and Sweden. Illustrated | Gettyimages

The expansion of NATO is going … haltingly. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland have applied to join the military alliance that includes the United States and much of Western Europe. But the process has hit a stumbling block. The Associated Press reports that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week said Sweden "can no longer expect any charity from us regarding their NATO membership application" after right-wing protesters burned a Koran outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm. Finland's foreign minister followed that by suggesting his country could join the alliance without Sweden if necessary. Why is Turkey opposed to NATO expansion? And how might this affect the war in Europe? Here's everything you need to know:
Why do Finland and Sweden want to join NATO?

One word: Russia. Finland shares a long border with Russia, and Sweden sits on the Baltic Sea where much of the Russian Navy operates. But both were longtime holdouts against joining the military alliance — they were officially neutral throughout the Cold War — until Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade another neighbor, Ukraine, in 2022. "Public support for NATO membership in the Nordic countries shot up virtually overnight after the start of the invasion," Axios reports. The two countries jointly applied for membership in May 2022. "Everything has changed when Russia attacked Ukraine," Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said at the time. "And I personally think that we cannot trust anymore there will be a peaceful future next to Russia."

What's the holdup?

NATO can't add new countries without approval from the government of every single country in the alliance. That wasn't a big deal when NATO had just 12 members, but now there are 30 countries in the organization. (In the United States, that requirement means two-thirds of the Senate must approve such applications: That happened by a 95-1 vote in August.) That means any single country can slow down the process if it chooses. "Joining NATO was never meant to be this hard, but because the alliance is now so big it just complicates things because you have to get 30 different leaders lined up and on the same page and 30 different legislatures lined up on the same page," The Atlantic Council's Christopher Skaluba tells The Hill.
Who are the holdouts?

Turkey and Hungary, but Hungary is expected to approve the applications this year. Erdogan, meanwhile, wants Sweden to "do more to tackle terrorist support among a Kurdish population of about 100,000, and to extradite suspects," Bloomberg reports. The Financial Times adds that Turkey wants Sweden to cut ties with Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) — a Kurdish militia that led the campaign against ISIS in Syria, but which also has ties to the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) that has waged an insurgency against Turkey since 1980. Sweden has tried to "distance itself" from the offending group, Reuters reports. (And it has also lifted an arms embargo against Turkey.). But it hasn't extradited the suspects that Turkey seeks.

What is the U.S. doing?

The United States, of course, is first among equals in the NATO alliance — so you would expect American leaders to push Turkey toward approving Sweden and Finland's applications. Indeed, U.S. and Turkish officials met in mid-January to discuss both NATO and other "defense cooperation" topics. EuroNews reports that Turkey made clear that it wants to upgrade its fleet of U.S.-made F-16 jet fighters. But Voice of America says complying with that request might not be so simple: Congress has to approve the sale of fighters to Turkey — and NATO expansion won't be the only condition of approval. The U.S. also wants a promise that Turkey won't take military action in northern Syria. In other words: It's complicated.

How does this affect the war in Ukraine?

Bloomberg's editors say the holdup "puts Europe's wider security at risk." Both countries have "considerable" defense capabilities that could come in useful "at a time when the alliance's resources are stretched from assisting Ukraine." But Russian leaders seem to think that — despite the slow process — the addition of Finland and Sweden is a done deal: Valery Gerasimov, the top Russian general in Ukraine, says planned reforms to the military include the ability to respond to threats posed by "the aspirations of the North Atlantic Alliance to expand to Finland and Sweden."

What's next?

The future is still muddy. Pekka Haavisto, the Finnish foreign minister, reportedly "backpedaled" after suggesting his country might join NATO without Sweden at its side — though The Associated Press notes it was the first time an official in either country had "raised doubts" about joining the alliance together. A resolution might not be in the offing for a while yet: The Wall Street Journal reports that Turkey won't officially take up approval of NATO expansion until its national elections, most likely in May