It starts today in its parliament Finlands the final discussion on the country’s accession to NATO, before Helsinki receives the necessary approval from Turkey and Hungary.

As Finland will hold parliamentary elections on April 2nd, Helsinki wants to avoid delays in joining NATO once Ankara and Budapest give the go-ahead.

This means that Finland is ready to move forward without waiting for Sweden, which has also been a candidate for the Alliance since last year, but currently faces a Turkish veto.

The 200 members of the Finnish parliament are expected to begin this evening debating the bill concerning the country’s accession to the nato, with the vote expected to take place until tomorrow, Wednesday.

This parliamentary process is taking place while the NATO Secretary General is in Finland Gens Stoltenberg, who will meet with the main leaders of the Scandinavian country of 5.5 million inhabitants.

The result of the vote is similar sure, as almost all parties in Finland are in favor of the country joining the Alliance, even those that were against NATO a year ago. It is characteristic that in a preliminary vote held last year in May, 188 MPs voted in favor of the country’s accession.

Only few MPs of the extreme left and the extreme right are expected to vote against the bill.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden decided to turn the page on their policy of military neutrality, asking to join NATO in mid-May 2022.

Twenty-eight of the Alliance’s 30 member countries have ratified the two Nordic countries’ membership.

It is pending the approval by two countries: by Hungarya, which has a more ambiguous attitude towards Russia, and from Turkey, which appears as a mediator in the conflict in Ukraine and has an old rivalry with Sweden mainly over the presence of Kurds on Swedish soil.

Until recently, Helsinki declared that it wished to join NATO together with Stockholm. But as the crisis between Turkey and Sweden escalated, the situation changed.

Even Stoltenberg admitted in early February that the most important thing is not that the two countries join NATO together, but that they join as soon as possible.

Finland and Sweden separately

Turkey confirmed yesterday Monday that it can Disassociate the integration of Finland from that of Sweden.

“We could separate Sweden’s accession process from Finland’s,” said Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu.

The adoption of the bill by the Finnish parliament does not mean that Helsinki will automatically join NATO, after receiving the approval of Turkey and Hungary.

But it sets a clear timeline: after the bill is adopted, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto has three months to sign it.

Niinisto has already stated that he will do so “as soon as it passes through parliament”. “If there are practical reasons, I can wait (…) but not after the April 2 elections.”

The accession document must then be sent to Washington “within a few weeks at the latest,” explained Tuomas Poisty, head of the authority that checks the legality of government activities.

A majority of Finns (53%) want their country to join NATO independently of Sweden, according to a poll published in early February.