NEWS CENTER – According to a recent survey in Finland, only 14 percent of the Finns agree that legislative changes ought to be made in order to get Turkey’s support for accession to the NATO alliance. 70 percent of respondents said that they do not support making concessions to Turkey.
The results of the survey, conducted by Helsingin Sanomat, have been released on Monday, one day before the leaders of Finland and Sweden are set to meet with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to convince him to drop his objections to their membership of NATO.
Ankara accuses the two Nordic countries of harbouring terrorists, even claiming that ‘there are terrorists’ in the Swedish parliament, and demands that the governments of Sweden and Finland take hard measures against dissidents of the Turkish administration, particularly Kurdish activists.
Turkey blocked bids by Sweden and Finland to join NATO in May.
The nationalist Finns Party voters constituted the majority of the 14 percent who supported making concessions, while the voters of the Green and Left Alliance expressed opposition to concessions by the largest majority.
According to a European Parliament Eurobarometer report released in June, on the other hand, a mere 12 percent of people in Sweden have a ‘positive’ view about Turkey. Only Greece and Cyprus, among European countries, have an even greater majority than Sweden with negative views about Turkey.
