Hungary is last holdout for Sweden’s Nato membership bid

Hungary is last holdout for Sweden’s Nato membership bid

BUDAPEST, Hungary — 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 and its conservative populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, are once again in the spotlight.

Orbán 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?

Hungary’s government, Orbán 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.

Yet Orbán’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, Orbán alone is in control.

While Turkey made a series of concrete demands from Sweden as preconditions for supporting its bid to join the alliance, Hungary’s government — long under fire in the European Union for alleged breaches of democracy and rule-of-law standards — has expressed no such requirements, hinting only that it expects a greater degree of respect from Stockholm.

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.

Agnes Vadai, a lawmaker with Hungary’s opposition Democratic Coalition party and a former secretary of state in the Ministry of

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