Hungary’s government and most of parliament are united in support for Sweden’s NATO membership bid after months of foot-dragging from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling party, a senior lawmaker said.
(Bloomberg) — Hungary’s government and most of parliament are united in support for Sweden’s NATO membership bid after months of foot-dragging from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling party, a senior lawmaker said.
A delegation from Orban’s Fidesz party told their counterparts in Stockholm on Tuesday that they support the expansion of the alliance, which the Nordic nations are trying to join following their neighbor Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The group will have a similar meeting in Helsinki on Wednesday.
Hungary’s parliament is then scheduled to ratify the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s enlargement in the week of March 20, according to the latest agenda on its website.
“We made it clear that the Hungarian government, the Hungarian president, the prime minister and most Hungarian lawmakers clearly support a Swedish NATO membership,” Csaba Hende, one of the Hungarian parliament members and a former defense minister, told TT news service.
Ratification would leave Turkey as the only holdout in the 30-member defense alliance.
It would also put an end to months of delays as Orban had effectively sought to use NATO expansion as leverage during his own standoff with the European Union over more than $30 billion in blocked funds.
With Hungary’s EU funds still suspended over graft and rule-of-law concerns — and with no public commitments from either Finland or Sweden to support the unblocking of the cash — the visit has largely become a face-saving attempt to allow Orban’s lawmakers to vent their frustrations before approving enlargement anyway.
Ruling party lawmakers — two from Hungary’s national legislature and two from the European Parliament — were also expected to tell their counterparts to stop spreading “lies” about the erosion of democracy in Hungary, Zsolt Nemeth, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of the delegation, told Bloomberg on March 3.
Preparing the ground for ratification, Orban’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, said last month that the government had backed NATO expansion all along and that it was parliamentarians who needed to be convinced.
In reality, Orban is the chairman of his Fidesz party and vets each of the party’s candidates ahead of legislative elections, who are then expected to toe the party line on legislative votes.
–With assistance from Kati Pohjanpalo and Niclas Rolander.
(Updates with lawmakers comment starting in third paragraph.)
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