Sweden is edging closer to achieving full NATO membership after its new Foreign Minister promised to cut the country's ties to the Kurdish YPG and PYD groups — a key demand by Turkey as a pre-condition for Sweden's accession to the alliance.
"The link between both organisations [the YPG and PYD] and the PKK is so close that it is not good for relations between us and Turkey," Foreign Minister Tobias Billström told state broadcaster Swedish Radio on Saturday. "The very first goal is Sweden's membership in NATO."
Turkey regards both the YPG, a Syria-based Kurdish militia, and the PYD, its associated political group, as extensions of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an organisation which has been fighting a guerrilla war against Turkey since 1984, and which is regarded as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the EU, and the US.
A 'more determined' government
At the NATO Madrid Summit last June, Sweden and Finland agreed with Turkey on the set of conditions that needed to be met for Turkey to withdraw its opposition to the Nordic countries' NATO applications. This included the requirement that Finland and Sweden "will not provide support for the YPG/PYD" as both constitute "threats to [Turkey's] national security".
This demand, however, was complicated by the fact that Sweden, along with the US and many other NATO countries, has provided significant backing to the YPG over the course of the Syrian Civil War.
Although Sweden's previous centre-left government had made some progress in meeting Turkey's other demands — which included, for instance, facilitating the extradition of Kurdish "terror suspects" to Turkey — it had thus far failed to explicitly recognise the YPG and PYD as linked to the PKK and hence, by association, as terrorist organisations.
However, Sweden's new right-wing government — which took power on October 17 and is relying on a far-right anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats, from outside the governing coalition — has adopted a much more hawkish stance on Kurdish groups operating in Sweden, in a shift which has drawn praise from Ankara.
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"We know that the previous Swedish government could not take serious steps," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said during a press conference with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Istanbul on Thursday. "But we see that the new government is more determined."
Çavuşoğlu, however, emphasised that there is still some way to go before all of Turkey's demands are met.
"It's not possible to say all the agreed measures ... have been fully implemented yet," he said.
Billström's latest announcement comes just days before Sweden's new Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson, is scheduled to fly to Ankara to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Kristersson recently informed Swedish media that his government was committed to fighting terrorism "in every way".
