Hungary admitted on Thursday that relations with Sweden are at a low point and demanded new “confidence measures” from the Nordic country to win Budapest’s support for NATO entry.
“The relationship between Sweden and Hungary (…) is at its lowest point and confidence measures are needed,” said the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Minister, Gergely Gulyás, quoted by the Spanish news agency Europa Press.
Gulyás accused Sweden of “intervening in the Brussels judgment against Hungary supporting the position of the European Commission (EC)” on the law for the protection of minors approved by Budapest.
The legislation prohibits the use in schools of materials that discuss homosexuality, which is also linked to pedophilia.
The EC referred Hungary to the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) in mid-2022, considering the law in question homophobic.
The position of Brussels has the support of a dozen countries, including Sweden, which consider the law discriminatory against people because of their sexual orientation, according to the Spanish news 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 NATO membership 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 refused to say when Parliament will decide on Sweden’s NATO membership.
Sweden and Finland applied for membership in May 2022, about three months after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.
Only Finland has seen, so far, the candidacy ratified by the 30 NATO members, which allowed it to enter the Atlantic Alliance on Tuesday, March 4, the day of the 74th anniversary of the military defense organization.
In addition to Hungary, Turkey also continues to obstruct Sweden’s entry into NATO, the acronym for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, of which Portugal is one of the founding members.
Turkey alleges that Sweden has not taken sufficient action against what it calls Kurdish “terrorist organizations”.
“Our ambition is to work tirelessly to become a member of NATO. This is a matter of the utmost importance for Sweden,” Swedish diplomacy chief Tobias Billstrom said in Brussels on Tuesday.
One of the Russian objectives to justify the invasion of Ukraine was to prevent the neighboring country from joining NATO and, consequently, 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 the annexation of the Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk.
Moscow had already annexed the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula in 2014. Ukraine and the international community in general do not recognize Russian sovereignty in the five Ukrainian regions.
Source: TSF
