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Sinking trust levels for Sahlin

A recent poll by Sifo suggests that the Swedish people’s confidence in Social Democrat leader Mona Sahlin has sunk by six percent since 2007.

Published: 1 May 2008 12:05 CEST

Now it is the Swedish Prime Minister and Moderate Party leader Fredrik Reinfeldt who is leading with 49 percent.

Back in December 2007 Mona Sahlin led by six percent when 48 percent of voters either had a strong or a very strong level of trust in Sahlin’s capabilities and Fredrik Reinfeldt only had 45 percent.

The Centre Party’s leader Maud Olofsson still makes it into the top three at 38 percent, despite losing four percent of voters´ trust since 2007.

Lowest in the popularity stakes is the Left Party leader Lars Ohly, who only garnered 18 percent of the Swedish people’s vote. In addition, Ohly is the party leader most voters claimed to have no confidence in at all – a whopping 26 percent.

The poll was carried out with 977 people over the age of 18 between the 21st and 24th of April.

CLIMATE CRISIS

Climate protesters wrap Swedish parliament in giant red scarf

Several hundred women surrounded Sweden's parliament with a giant knitted red scarf to protest political inaction over global warming.

Published: 22 April 2024 11:47 CEST
Climate protesters wrap Swedish parliament in giant red scarf

Responding to a call from the Mothers Rebellion movement (Rebellmammorna in Swedish), the women marched around the Riksdag with the scarf made of 3,000 smaller scarves, urging politicians to honour a commitment to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“I am here for my child Dinalo and for all the kids. I am angry and sad that politicians in Sweden are acting against the climate,” Katarina Utne, 41, a mother of a four-year-old and human resources coach, told AFP.

The women unfurled their scarves and marched for several hundred metres, singing and holding placards calling to “save the climate for the children’s future”.

“The previous government was acting too slowly. The current government is going in the wrong direction in terms of climate policy,” said psychologist Sara Nilsson Lööv, referring to a recent report on Swedish climate policy.

The government, led by the conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats, is in danger of failing to meet its 2030 climate targets, an agency tasked with evaluating climate policy recently reported.

According to the Swedish Climate Policy Council, the government has made decisions, including financial decisions, that will increase greenhouse gas emissions in the short term.

“Ordinary people have to step up. Sweden is not the worst country but has been better previously,” 67-year-old pensioner Charlotte Bellander said.

The global movement, Mothers Rebellion, was established by a group of mothers in Sweden, Germany, the USA, Zambia and Uganda.

It organises peaceful movements in public spaces by sitting and singing but does not engage in civil disobedience, unlike the Extinction Rebellion movement, which some of its organisers came from.

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