BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) \u2014 With Turkey completing its ratification of Sweden’s bid to join NATO, Hungary is the last member of the military alliance not to have given its approval.<\/p>\n
After more than a year of delays, and consistent urging from its Western partners to move forward with Sweden’s application, the Central European country and its conservative populist prime minister, Viktor Orb\u00e1n, are once again in the spotlight.<\/p>\n
ORB\u00c1N COMPARES HUNGARY’S EU MEMBERSHIP TO SOVIET OCCUPATION IN FIERY SPEECH<\/strong><\/p>\n Orb\u00e1n has long promised that Hungary wouldn’t be the last NATO member to ratify Sweden’s request to join the alliance. Yet Monday’s approval in Turkey’s parliament has upended those guarantees, and others in the alliance are now asking: When will Budapest follow Ankara’s lead?<\/p>\n Hungary’s government, Orb\u00e1n says, is in favor of bringing Sweden into NATO, but lawmakers in his governing Fidesz party remain unconvinced, offended by “blatant lies” from some Swedish politicians that have excoriated the quality of Hungary’s democracy.<\/p>\n Hungarys right-wing leader, Viktor Orban, claims he does not oppose Swedens membership in NATO.<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet Orb\u00e1n’s critics say that there is no such schism within his party, and that when it comes to Hungary’s approval of Sweden’s NATO membership, Orb\u00e1n alone is in control.<\/p>\n While Turkey made a series of concrete demands from Sweden as preconditions for supporting its bid to join the alliance, Hungary’s government \u2014 long under fire in the European Union for alleged breaches of democracy and rule-of-law standards \u2014 has expressed no such requirements, hinting only that it expects a greater degree of respect from Stockholm.<\/p>\n Hungary’s opposition parties, which favor Sweden’s membership in NATO, have made several attempts over the past year to schedule a vote on the matter. But lawmakers from the Fidesz party, which holds a two-thirds majority in parliament, have refused to lend their support.<\/p>\n Agnes Vadai, a lawmaker with Hungary\u2019s opposition Democratic Coalition party and a former secretary of state in the Ministry of Defense, said that the opposition would once again seek to force a vote on Sweden’s membership before parliament’s next scheduled session in late February.<\/p>\n But there’s “very little chance” that Orb\u00e1n\u2019s party will support the initiative, she said, adding that Hungary’s intransigence on the issue is the prime minister’s attempt to prove his weight on the international stage.<\/p>\n “It has nothing to do with Sweden now, it has nothing to do with Turkey now. It\u2019s merely Orb\u00e1n\u2019s personal attitude,” she said. “It shows that he’s driven not by political rationale, but by personal vanity. There is no gain for Hungary in this game anymore, because it’s a game that he’s playing.”<\/p>\n As Turkey’s parliament prepared to vote on the ratification on Monday, Orb\u00e1n announced that he’d sent a letter to Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, inviting him to Budapest to negotiate on NATO membership.<\/p>\n Kristersson hasn’t commented publicly on Orb\u00e1n\u2019s letter, but Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstr\u00f6m said that he saw “no reason” to negotiate with Hungary on the matter, noting that Budapest hasn’t presented any conditions for accepting Sweden into the alliance.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Orb\u00e1n tweeted that he\u2019d had a phone call with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in which he had “reaffirmed that the Hungarian government supports the NATO membership of Sweden,” and that he would continue to urge his parliament to approve its bid.<\/p>\n But Dorka Takacsy, an analyst and research fellow at the Centre for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy, said that Orb\u00e1n’s invitation to Kristersson showed that the fate of Sweden’s NATO bid lies not in the hands of Hungarian lawmakers, but with Orb\u00e1n himself.<\/p>\n Orb\u00e1n’s letter, she said, “dismantled the narrative that there was any dispute within the parliamentary group of Fidesz … It simply points to the fact that it is Orb\u00e1n, the prime minister himself, who manages this whole issue single-handedly.”<\/p>\n Vadai, the opposition lawmaker, agreed.<\/p>\n “Anybody who believed that it\u2019s in the hands of the governing party lawmakers was seriously mistaken,” she said. “It\u2019s the decision of Orb\u00e1n and nobody else.”<\/p>\n A vote on the protocols for Sweden’s NATO accession hasn’t yet appeared on the Hungarian parliament’s agenda, and barring a surprise emergency session, the matter is unlikely to go before lawmakers until at least late February.<\/p>\n Hungary’s delays, as well as Orb\u00e1n’s friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, have frustrated other allies who want to expand the alliance and provide security guarantees to Sweden amid the war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n With such stakes, Vadai said that she worries Orb\u00e1n’s conduct on the international stage has damaged Hungary’s relationship with its Western partners.<\/p>\n “He pushes Hungary to the very edge of NATO now, he’s marginalizing my country,” she said. “This is just a sin.”<\/p>\n <\/div>\n[ad_2]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [ad_1] BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) \u2014 With Turkey completing its ratification of Sweden’s bid to join NATO, Hungary is the last member of the military alliance not to have given its approval. After more than a year of delays, and consistent urging from its Western partners to move forward with Sweden’s application, the Central European country …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Viktor](\"https:\/\/static.foxnews.com\/foxnews.com\/content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Viktor-Orban.gif\")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>\n