This Sunday marks the halfway point for the current government, so from next week on we are closer to the next election in 2026 than we are to the last one.
Whatever you think about them, they’ve been busy, driving through a long list of policies tightening Swedish laws on migration and criminal justice, and cutting taxes on petrol, diesel and flights.
But most of these changes have primarily followed the agenda of the Sweden Democrats, the government’s far-right support party. It has sometimes been hard to find much trace of the tax-cutting agenda of the Moderate Party. They’ve had the ministerial positions, but paid the price in policy.
This week that changed.
Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson made a a series of budget announcements, which she said would “put more money in households’ wallets”, finally giving more liberal Moderate Party supporters something back for their vote.
We looked at how a new no-tax threshold for Investment Savings Accounts will make it more worthwhile for people living and working in Sweden to save up some of their money in shares, bonds and funds, and we also published a tax calculator, showing how the increase in Sweden’s employment tax reduction, or jobbskatteavdrag, will cut next year’s tax bill for people on different incomes.
The Sweden Democrats have done badly in the budget. In the election they campaigned for a cap on the cost of dental care. In this budget, the government proposed scrapping free dental care for 19-23 year olds, while making it cheaper for the over-67s.
There will be more budget news next week, so we’ll keep you informed.
Picture of the Week
Ian Moloney snapped this wonderfully peaceful scene of a late summer evening on the water in the centre of Gothenburg. If you want to congratulate him in person, he’s singing at the Fagan’s Pub in Malmö at 10pm on Saturday night.
What else have we been doing?
In the latest in the series of articles we’ve done on Sweden’s generous parental leave system, which turns 50 years old this year, we explained how to combine parental leave and holiday entitlement to spend three months as a couple together outside Sweden with a new baby.
We looked at whether Indians still need to formally renounce their Indian citizenship before being Swedish citizens. On a related topic, we looked at changes to Indian guidelines will benefit Indian children who risk being made stateless when their parents take Swedish citizenship.
The Swedish Public Health Agency made global news for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic, when it issued new recommendations for children’s screen use. Children under two should not be given screens at all, those between two and five years old should have one hour a day max, while those between five and 12 should have between one and two hours a day, half the four hours they use screens on average today.
As I write this, my two children, who average closer to five hours a day, are staring at screens. We talk about my frustrations at quite some length in this week’s Sweden in Focus podcast, which you can find here.
There was a lot of news this week to disappoint people who believe action to reduce climate emissions should be the top priority.
The government announced that it was scrapping the flight tax brought in back in 2018, which promises to make flights a bit cheaper and as a result encourage people to take more of them.
The state-owned power company Vattenfall also said it was cancelling Kriegers Flak, its giant wind power project offshore south of Trelleborg, the latest in a succession of bad news for the troubled Swedish wind industry.
Finally, we tried to answer the important question of why it can be so hard to find fresh fish in supermarkets in Sweden.
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