Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok has signed the ratification of the agreement on Sweden’s accession to NATO, the head of state’s office said.
Notably, it was the first document signed by Tamás Sulyok as the country’s president.
Stockholm abandoned its policy of non-alignment for greater security within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation after the outbreak of military conflict in Ukraine in 2022.
The remaining formalities, such as depositing the accession documents with Washington, are likely to be completed quickly. Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson told a news conference in Stockholm:
It is tremendously important and hopefully we will now become members and it will not be a matter of weeks but a matter of days. It will be good for Sweden and it will be good for NATO. It will be good for stability in the entire Euro-Atlantic area that Sweden can become a full-fledged member of NATO.
Most NATO countries quickly approved Sweden’s May 2022 application, but Turkey and Hungary were slow to accept the new state into the Alliance because they expressed dissatisfaction with Sweden’s alleged support for Kurdish separatists and criticism of the Hungarian government.
On 26 February, the Hungarian parliament ratified the agreement on Sweden’s accession to NATO. Earlier Bloomberg reported that the ceremony of Sweden’s accession to NATO has been postponed and will take place not earlier than the first decade of March.
The accession of Finland last year and soon Sweden, which has not been at war since 1814, is the most significant expansion of NATO since it accepted members from Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
