Hungary signaled on Thursday that it could ratify Sweden’s bid to join NATO in the fall, and a ruling party lawmaker said Turkey’s decision to back Sweden’s bid opened the door to strengthening the alliance at a time of need, Reuters reported..

Hungarian lawmaker Zholt Nemet said there was no need to call an extraordinary session of parliament earlier to make a decision, as Turkey’s approval would come in the fall.

Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has delayed ratification, but his foreign minister said earlier this month that Budapest would not delay the process if Turkey dropped its opposition, which it did on Monday.

“We will start our work in mid-September,” Nemet, head of the foreign affairs committee of the Hungarian parliament, told private broadcaster InfoRadio.

There is no need to move sooner, he said, because Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan will not submit ratification of Sweden’s NATO membership to the Turkish parliament until it opens in the fall.

Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO last year in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, abandoning their decade-long Cold War military non-alignment policy.

Ankara has resisted ratification for months, accusing Sweden of doing too little against people Turkey considers terrorists, mostly Kurdish members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).