Hungarian House Speaker Laszlo Kover has said that he has received dozens of emails from Swedish and Finnish voters urging him to block their countries’ accession into NATO.
Unlike Hungary, which held a referendum before joining NATO in 1999, 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.
“Hungarian representatives received dozens of emails from Sweden and Finland not to accept the accession, because according to them there is no democratic legitimacy behind the decision,” Kover told Hungary’s Hir TV on Sunday.
The Hungarian government initially backed Sweden’s 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, about the rule of law in Hungary, about democracy, about life here.”
