Hungary, one of the two countries undecided on the NATO accession bids of Sweden and Finland, will likely postpone a long-delayed vote on the issue at its parliament. A senior government official proposed the delay for ratification.
In a letter published Tuesday by Hungarian news website hvg.hu, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen requested that a parliamentary session scheduled to begin on March 20 – during which lawmakers were expected to vote on the two Nordic countries joining the military alliance – be postponed to a week later. Semjen cited Hungary's ongoing negotiations with the European Union's executive branch over Budapest's alleged breaches of the bloc's rule-of-law requirements as the reason for the delay. The speaker of Hungary's parliament, himself a member of Semjen's ruling coalition, must approve the request for a postponement.
Hungary and Türkiye remain the only two NATO member countries that have not yet approved the Nordic countries’ bids to join the Western military alliance. The delay is the second in two weeks and only the latest of many that have come in succession since July 2022.
On March 2, the ratification vote was pushed back by two weeks as Hungary sent a delegation to Sweden and Finland to resolve "political disputes” that had raised doubts among some ruling party lawmakers on whether to support the NATO applications. Yet, members of the delegation spoke positively about their meetings with Swedish and Finnish officials, indicating that Hungary's parliament was likely to ratify the bids some time soon but without giving a timeline.
The northern European neighbors dropped their long-standing military neutrality and sought NATO membership in May in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. On Tuesday, Sweden’s prime minister acknowledged that it is likely Finland will join NATO before his country does due to Türkiye's opposition to the Swedish bid because of the latter's continued harboring of terrorist groups posing a threat to Turkish national security.
