French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday called on his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to "
respect the sovereign choice
" of Finland and Sweden to join NATO, and hoped that a "
solution
" would be quickly found to lift the Turkish veto.
To read also NATO: can Turkey definitively block the accession of Finland and Sweden?
“
The President of the Republic underlined the importance of respecting the sovereign choice of these two countries, resulting from a democratic process and intervening in reaction to the evolution of their security environment
”, indicated the Elysée to the from the telephone interview.
“Concrete measures”
Ankara warned on Wednesday that it would not agree to the accession of Sweden and Finland without having obtained "
concrete measures
" from them concerning its security concerns, after receiving delegations of diplomats from these two countries. .
Turkey opened a crisis within NATO, of which it is a member, by opposing the extension of the organization to these two countries which asked to join the Alliance after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and received the support of the overwhelming majority of Member States.
Read alsoThe tide is turning in NATO and Europe against Erdogan's Turkey
Finland in particular shares 1,300 km of land border with Russia.
Turkey accuses the Nordic countries, in particular Sweden which has a large community of Turkish exiles, of harboring Kurdish militants from the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which it considers a terrorist organization.
She also denounces the presence of supporters of the preacher Fethullah Gülen, whom she suspects of having orchestrated the coup attempt of July 2016.