Letters from people of NATO applicants are made public by Hungary

Hungarian House Speaker Laszlo Kover has claimed that he received dozens of emails from Swedish and Finnish voters urging him to block their countries’ accession into NATO. The Hungarian parliament voted in favor of Finland joining NATO last month, days before a similar vote in Türkiye cleared the way for the Nordic nation to become the bloc’s 31st member. Finland and Sweden both renounced their neutrality and applied to join NATO last year, and although polls indicated that the majority of voters in both countries supported the move, neither government put the decision to a referendum. The Hungarian government initially backed Sweden and Finland’s membership applications, but a parliamentary vote was then stalled after Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused both nations of “spreading blatant lies about Hungary”. Less than two weeks after Hungary voted to accept Finland into NATO, the Finnish and Swedish governments joined the European Commission’s legal case against Hungary’s Child Protection Law, which has been criticized by other EU members as anti-LGBT.