Hungary admitted on Thursday that relations with Sweden are at an all-time low and demanded new “confidence measures” from the Nordic country to win Budapest’s support for joining NATO.
“The relationship between Sweden and Hungary (…) is at its lowest point and confidence measures are needed,” said Prime Minister Gergely Gulyás, quoted by the Spanish agency Europa Press.
Gulyás accused Sweden of “intervening in the Brussels judgment against Hungary by supporting the position of the European Commission (EC)” on the law for the protection of minors passed by Budapest.
The legislation prohibits the use in schools of material discussing homosexuality, which is also linked to pedophilia.
The EC took Hungary to the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) in mid-2022 because it considered the law in question homophobic.
Brussels’ position has the support of a dozen countries, including Sweden, which see the law as discriminatory against people on the basis of sexual orientation, according to the Spanish agency EFE.
Budapest argues that the legislation is intended to protect minors.
Hungary is the only EU country that has not yet ratified Sweden’s membership of NATO and also justifies its position with criticism from Swedish politicians about the state of democracy in the country.
Speaking to the press in Budapest, Gergely Gulyás declined to say when Parliament will make a decision on Sweden’s accession to NATO.
Sweden and Finland applied for membership in May 2022, about three months after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
Only Finland has so far seen the candidacy ratified by NATO’s 30 members, allowing it to join the Atlantic Alliance on Tuesday, March 4, the day of the military defense organization’s 74th anniversary.
In addition to Hungary, Turkey also continues to block Sweden’s accession to NATO, the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which Portugal is a founding member.
Turkey claims that Sweden has not taken sufficient action against what it calls Kurdish “terrorist organisations”.
“Our ambition is that we will work tirelessly to join NATO. It is a matter of the utmost importance for Sweden,” Swedish diplomatic chief Tobias Billstrom said in Brussels on Tuesday.
One of the Russian objectives in justifying the invasion of Ukraine was to prevent the neighboring country from joining NATO and thus the expansion of the Atlantic Alliance.
The new NATO member country Finland shares a land border of more than 1,300 kilometers with Russia.
Ukraine also formally applied for NATO membership in September last year, when Russia announced its annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Zaporijia, Donetsk and Lugansk.
Moscow had already annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.
Ukraine and the wider international community do not recognize Russian sovereignty in the five Ukrainian regions.
Source: DN
