Sweden expects Türkiye and Hungary to vote soon on its application to join the NATO alliance, Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said in Helsinki after a meeting with his Finnish counterpart on Friday.
"We see the development in Hungary as positive and we judge that there, as with Türkiye, a ratification process will soon be concluded when parliament votes on these questions," Billstrom said.
"There is nothing that indicates we are not going to get a positive answer from the parliament in Budapest."
Accession to NATO is a top priority for Sweden's newly appointed government, Billstrom said in Helsinki on Friday after the meeting with his Finnish counterpart, Pekka Haavisto.
"The new Swedish government attaches the highest priority to our NATO accession," Billstrom told reporters.
He said an upcoming meeting between Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was part of that process.
Haavisto said that his country remains in regular contact with Türkiye amid the Nordic nation's NATO membership bid and that he has been in dialogue with his Turkish counterpart during the past week.
Erdoğan said he has agreed to meet with Sweden’s new prime minister in Ankara to discuss the Scandinavian country’s bid to join NATO, describing the visit as an opportunity to test Stockholm’s "sincerity" in meeting Türkiye's conditions.
In response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Sweden abandoned a longstanding policy of military nonalignment and applied for NATO membership this year together with neighboring Finland. Türkiye, already one of the oldest members of the military alliance, threatened to block the process.
Ankara placed a series of demands on Stockholm, in particular, to crack down on some groups that Ankara accuses of terrorism and considers to be national security threats.
Erdoğan told a group of reporters Thursday upon his return from a trip to Azerbaijan that Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson had made comments "in favor of the fight against terrorism and terrorists." The Turkish leader said he accepted Kristersson's request to visit the Turkish capital.
"Of course, we will test their sincerity on this issue during this visit," Erdoğan said in comments quoted by Turkish media on Friday.
NATO operates by consensus, so Sweden and Finland need Türkiye's approval to join. The parliaments of Türkiye and Hungary are yet to ratify their accession.
"Our stance has not changed," Erdoğan said. "There is no compromise in the fight against terrorism and we have no intention of making any concessions."
Last month, Sweden announced it would lift an arms embargo it imposed on Türkiye in 2019 following a Turkish military operation against the YPG terrorist group in Syria. The move was widely seen as a step aimed at securing Ankara’s approval for Sweden's NATO membership.