COPY LINK

For members

SWEDISH HABITS

Twelve things about Sweden that make me smile

With new Swedish citizens soon to be welcomed into the fold with National Day ceremonies across the country, Nordic editor Richard Orange runs through some of the things about their new country that warm his heart.

Published: 1 June 2023 06:07 CEST

Twelve things about Sweden that make me smile

Two children wearing their winter overalls. Photo: Credits: Carolina Romare/imagebank.sweden.se

Pontoons or bryggor

Any pond or lake in Sweden bigger than a football pitch will have its own pontoon and whenever I see one, its wooden platform leading my eye out invitingly towards the deeper water, it always brings an involuntary smile to my face.

Swimming in fresh water is one of life’s simple pleasures, and Sweden’s bryggor do celebrate that, but they also demonstrate how Swedes work collectively. Bryggor are almost always well-maintained, but are rarely owned by anyone. Despite this, they’re always free to use. This is not how things work back in my home country of the UK, and it’s a fantastic thing.

The pontoon at Richard Orange’s local lake. Photo: Mia Orange

Overloaded box bikes

I suspect some in Sweden would dismiss lådcyklar or box bikes, as a marker of the country’s smug, left-of-centre middle class. But even after owning my own battered and ancient example for nigh on a decade, seeing one can still make me break out into a smile.

To amuse me, they need to be overloaded. It could be a gaggle of kids of different ages without a seatbelt in sight, a towering piece of furniture, a joyful-looking 20-something, or an enormous dog.

To me, there’s something wonderfully free about box bikes. A life with fewer cars, slightly chaotic, a little bit hippy but still very sensible.

A cargo bike, although not quite overloaded enough to qualify. Photo: Sofia Sabel/imagebank.sweden.se

A well-tooled utility belt

Sweden is a country of engineers and practical people and nothing exemplifies this more than the utility belts, often incorporated into work trousers, worn by the legions of prosperous-looking electricians, carpenters, builders and other workmen or entreprenörer – down where I live in Skåne anyway.

They will have, at the very least, a screwdriver, a hammer, a Mora knife, an extendable ruler, and a carpenter’s pencil, all neatly organised and at the ready.

For me, it’s evidence of the fact that even after years of growing inequality, Sweden’s blue collar workers still enjoy comparatively higher wages than their counterparts in many other countries in Europe, or in the US or Australia. It’s a sign of the dignity and professionalism of the country’s manual workers, and that can only be a good thing.

Sun worshippers

They start to appear at some point in March or April. People standing absolutely still on the pavement or sitting with their back against a wall, eyes closed, just enjoying the sensation of warm sun on their faces.

Even for someone from cloudy, overcast Britain, this is quite strange behaviour, so it must seem wildly foreign to someone from a sunny country like Italy or Spain.

While Sweden’s winters can be cold, grey and depressing, it can seem worth it, almost anyway, when everything and everyone springs back into life in the spring. For me, it’s the sunworshippers, rather than the first spring flowers, that mark the moment this quickening has begun.

Valstugor or “election cabins”

The highlight of every election year for me is visiting the makeshift villages of valstugor, or election cabins, that spring up in town and city squares across the country.

Anyone can just wander up and just start chatting to the political activists about whatever political issue they want to talk about, local, regional or national, and very often the parties’ most senior local politicians will be there.

I’ve witnessed the local head of the far-right Sweden Democrats passionately debating an overexcited crowd of youths with immigrant backgrounds, the head of the local Moderates brutally disown his party’s leader and prime ministerial candidate, and Social Democrats discuss how pessimistic they feel ahead of the coming vote.

For me, it’s a sign of the openness of Swedish society and of how impressively healthy and alive the country’s democracy is at a local level. I always walk away from spending my lunch break touring the cabins beaming.

Valstugor or ‘election cabins’ for the Sweden Democrats and Christian Democrats ahead of Sweden’s 2022 election. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

Raggarbilar

There’s nothing like witnessing a gleaming 1965 Pontiac Bonneville convertible cruising along a Swedish country road to put a smile on your face. I’m not a car enthusiast, but I appreciate passion when I see it, and the sheer incongruity of seeing American cars from the 1950s and 1960s cars on the roads of Sweden always amuses me.

Sweden’s raggare subculture, which is based around an obsession with 1950s American culture and cars, is fascinating. It’s almost entirely based in the countryside, so you only really encounter it when you leave the big cities.

I like to try and get a look at who the person is who has devoted so much of their spare time to renovating and maintaining their beautiful vehicle.

Power Big Meet in Västerås, the world’s largest meet for vintage American cars. Photo: Pontus Lundahl/TT

The mayor on a bike

Since foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death 2003 while shopping in upmarket NK department store, Sweden’s leading national politicians have tended to travel with security.

But the same is not the case at a regional and local level, and here in Malmö you’ll often see the mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh going from place to place completely unsupervised on her bicycle.

As with valstugor, for me it’s a sign of the openness of Swedish democracy.

Toddlers in winter overalls

Det finns inget dåligt väder – bara dåliga kläder. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.” If you’ve spent a winter in Sweden as a foreigner, you’ve almost certainly heard this Swedish saying over and over again.

It’s true, and particularly true of the gangs of toddlers you’ll see out in the snow in parks and preschool playgrounds across the country, wearing the winter overalls that look almost like little space suits.

You may be spending the dark Swedish winter largely cooped up in well-heated apartments, but it’s heartening to see that they, at least, are not. And that always makes me smile.

Coffee mornings (or afternoons for that matter)

The local village café near where we are building our summer house has a little sign on the wall informing the clientele of its frukostklubben, or “breakfast club”, explaining who were the first locals to attend and which table they sit at.

If you get there for its 8am opening, you’ll soon see the guy who runs the local plumbing firm, an electrician, and perhaps the odd farmer, take their place at the table and begin gabbling on about local matters, discussing politics, all in the distinctive mellow rural accent of southeastern Skåne.

These sorts of gatherings happen across the country. You’ll see a bunch of old ladies in their 80s and 90s meeting over cakes and coffee in the more traditional types of konditori, and it gladdens the heart.

Killjoy festive news stories

Whenever it’s time for a Swedish celebration, such as Christmas, Easter, Valborg, New Year, I’m always on the look out for the killjoy festive news stories that are a grand, if little recognised, Swedish media tradition.

“Why Christmas is a dangerous time for your pets”, “The particle pollution caused by Valborg bonfires”, “How Sweden’s Christmas herring are dying out”. Whether they come up with a totally new angle or refresh an old classic, no festive period ever passes without a little injection of misery from Sweden’s newspapers and broadcasters.

For me, it says something about the Swedish reluctance to ever really enjoy anything absolutely and without reserve, a hangover perhaps from the country’s Lutheran heritage.

“Alarm on chemicals in Swedish crayfish.” A typically miserable headline for a Swedish festive story. Photo: Screenshot

Rapeseed

This might perhaps be something limited to people who live in Skåne, but the wide fields of bright yellow rapeseed flowers you come across when driving around Sweden in the early summer always blow me away. You come over the crest of a hill and there it is. If you throw in a whitewashed medieval church, and a few wind turbines rotating majestically on the horizon, it can be a breathtaking sight.

A field of rapeseed in Skåne, southern Sweden. Photo: Jerker Andersson/imagebank.sweden.se

The kulturtant, or “culture lady”

Once you develop an eye for them, Sweden’s kulturtantar, or “culture ladies”, are instantly recognisable and everywhere, with their baggy patterned clothes in rough cotton or home-knitted wool, brightly coloured arty looking glasses, and chunky jewellery.

They are gently ridiculed in Sweden as another manifestation of the smug, liberal middle classes, but they are also celebrated as the core audience that keeps Sweden’s cultural world alive. It’s the kulturtantar who buy the theatre tickets, go to the literature readings, and visit the art galleries in Sweden’s cities and towns.

In a country that I sometimes find a bit too practically minded, I’m glad they exist, and a lot of my friends, though still in their 40s, are well on the way to kulturtant status.

Member comments

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Should Sweden abandon a weak krona for the euro?

The krona hitting rock bottom has reawakened a debate that had been dead for twenty years.

Hedge fund manager Christer Gardell kickstarted the debate before the New Year, when he said Sweden should abandon the krona, which was now “a shitty little currency”. In January, the Moderate Party grandee Gunnar Hökmark, chief of the Frivärld think-tank and long-term euro advocate, argued that Sweden should join.

Veteran economist Lars Calmfors, who chaired the government inquiry which in 1999 recommended that Sweden stay outside, made a similar call shortly afterwards. Carl Hammer, chief strategist at SEB, who had voted against joining in the 2003 referendum wrote in May that he, too, was now “leaning towards a ‘yes'” on euro membership.

Now one of Sweden’s three government parties has started to campaign on the issue. The Liberal Party, long in theory in favour of euro membership, on September 4th called for a new government inquiry on joining the currency.

“We can quite simply no longer afford to stay outside [the euro],” the party’s leader Johan Pehrson wrote in the Aftonbladet newspaper. “Let’s upgrade our EU membership from ‘basic’ to ‘premium’. Let’s bring in the euro now!'”

Is it a hot topic?

According to Calmfors and Hammer, the debate is raging in the circles they move in, but has yet to really spread to the general public.

“Between 2010 and the end of last year, I don’t think I was asked even once to speak about Sweden and the euro. But now I have two or three invitations each week, and in fact six this week when we are approaching the 20th anniversary of the referendum.”

“I see a lot of academic and business seminars on the weak krona,” Hammer agreed.

For both of them, the revival in interest has come about mainly due to the weakness of the krona, which Calmfors complained had been trading as if Sweden were a “banana republic”. And unlike during the 1999 internet crash or the 2007 financial crisis, when a drop in the krona helped bolster Sweden’s economy, this time the weak currency was causing problems.

“Earlier it has benefitted us,” Calmfors said. “The krona depreciated and firms could gain market share. It helped stabilise output and employment,” he explained. “But this time, it’s different. Now, the depreciation of the krona counteracts the efforts of the Riksbank to get inflation down and reduce aggregate demand. So this time, it is a problem.”

For Hammer, the weakness of the krona was more understandable, reflecting a flight to strong currencies in reaction to the war in Ukraine.

“Had we not had Ukraine, and had we not had other global issues, I think the krona would have been stronger,” he said.

Calmfors isn’t so certain about this, pointing out that the Swiss Franc, another small floating currency, has not been similarly weak. He does, however, see the invasion of Ukrainian as the second big reason why the euro debate has revived.

“The war in Ukraine has made Swedes recalibrate our view of our position in the world,” he said. “The application for Nato membership is the most obvious evidence for this, but I think it spills over to the euro issue as well.”

Lars Calmfors, Professor Emeritus in Economics at Stockholm University. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

HOW HAVE THE FUNDAMENTALS CHANGED?

1. Sweden’s government finances are much stronger

While the weak krona is the catalyst for the debate, for Calmfors, the improvement in Sweden’s government finances is a much better reason for sceptics to change their minds.

When he submitted his report in 1999, his committee’s main argument against joining was the risk of a country-specific economic shock which would affect Sweden, but not other EU countries. Such a shock would be hard to combat if Sweden no longer had the freedom to set its own interest rates or devalue its currency.

“We argued that (…) it’s good to have your own monetary policy, an exchange rate that can change,” he said.

At that time, Sweden’s national debt was at 70-75 percent of GDP, well above the 60 percent that is the (increasingly theoretical) maximum for countries signed up to the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact.

“This was very important in the 1990s, because we had a sovereign debt crisis in Sweden, so fiscal policy could not be used as a substitute for monetary policy,” he remembered.

Now, Sweden’s national debt is just 35 percent of GDP, well below that of France at 98 percent or Germany at 60 percent and, for Calmfors, this removes the biggest obstacle to joining, as Sweden’s government would be able to spend its way out of any country-specific shock.

“That’s very low in an international context, so we have a lot of fiscal firepower. No one would argue with us if we had an expansionary fiscal policy.”

Hammer, arguing along the same lines, pointed out that in the years before and since the euro referendum, Sweden had never in fact suffered the sort of country-specific shock that Calmfors and his committee had worried about. The Riksbank, meanwhile, had always run a monetary policy in line with that of the European Central Bank.

“For the past 30 years, Sweden has been living with a floating exchange rate but living as if we’ve had a fixed exchange rate,” he said.

The country, he explained, had had strict limitations on government spending, a surplus target, a very coordinated and orderly wage bargaining process, and a fully funded pension system. “So if any country would have the room and possibility to live with a fixed exchange rate, it’s Sweden.”

2. Businesses don’t use the krona anyway

For Hammer, the biggest new argument against the krona is not so much improved government finances as the fact that Sweden’s big companies now barely use it.

And the same goes for Sweden’s pension funds.

“Large corporations don’t want to deal in the krona – they prefer to make transactions and trade in euros and dollars – and we channel a huge part of our surplus or excess savings into foreign asset markets,” he said. “So, we’ve already to some extent adopted foreign currencies, but we’ve also kept the krona, which from my perspective makes the arguments for having it less strong.”

It is this which has pushed him towards a “yes” despite continuing to believe that the euro is “a suboptimal currency union”.

“I’m leaning towards voting yes if we were to have a new referendum on the basis that the foundation for the currency has been undermined by the fact that we’re so dependent on foreign currency,” he said. “From that perspective, I think, you can make a case for joining the euro on the grounds of greater financial stability.”

3. After Brexit Sweden looks more and more alone

With the UK leaving the European Union altogether, Croatia joining the euro this year, Bulgaria scheduled to join in 2025, and Romania in 2026, the number of countries who are in the EU but not the eurozone is falling.

“If you ask people, like Swedish commissioners in the EU or people that have been doing negotiations in in the EU, they have the view that we have lost out by not belonging to the core,” Calmfors said. “The risk that we will lose out probably becomes bigger, the greater the share of EU countries that adopt the euro.”

Carl Hammer, chief strategist at Sweden’s SEB Bank. Photo: SEB

WHAT ARE THE STRONGEST ARGUMENTS NOT TO JOIN?

1. The risk of country-specific shocks is real

Just because Sweden has more fiscal firepower to deal with a country specific shock does not mean the risk of such shocks is not a major drawback to euro membership.

Finland suffered one when Nokia, far and away the country’s biggest company, mismanaged its reaction to the launch of the iPhone and exited to the mobile phone business. Between 2008 and 2022 its debt to GDP ratio more than doubled from 33 percent to 74 percent.

Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal arguably suffered from the issue during the European banking crisis.

As Sweden’s economy is unusually sensitive to interest rates, with much higher private debt and a high share of variable rate mortgages, the ECB could easily set an interest rate that, while right for most eurozone countries, would be too high for Sweden.

“That could be a problem, but it’s also a problem that could be dealt with by using fiscal policy,” Calmfors argues.

2. The risk of bank bailouts and country bailouts remains

The other big argument against joining the euro, which was clearly demonstrated during the European debt crisis from 2009 until about 2014, is that Sweden would have to help bail out countries, such as Italy and Greece, which have been less disciplined in the management of their government finances.

Joining the euro would also mean joining the European Banking Union, which means that Sweden might also have to participate in rescuing banks in countries with less well-functioning financial supervision.

Calmfors acknowledged that this was still a risk, but argued that members of the European Union who are not part of the eurozone were increasingly being asked to contribute to rescue packages anyway.

“If you look at the support after the Covid crisis and during the Covid crisis, we had to pay that as well, even though we were not a member of the monetary union,” he said.

And when it came to bank bailouts, Sweden was, he argued, as likely to benefit as to lose out, given the high indebtedness of Sweden’s citizens.

“We might end up having to pay for bank crises in other countries. But on the other hand, we would also be helped if we had a financial crisis, which of course is not something we can rule out,” he said.

Also, he said there might be an advantage in having banks and other financial services regulated by the European Central Bank and other European regulators, as a European regulator might have more expertise, there are many cross-border links between banks, and there would be less of a risk of a cosy relationship building up between local banks and the regulator.

HOW HAVE THE ADVANTAGES OF EURO MEMBERSHIP CHANGED?

Calmfors argues that while the negative risks of adopting the euro have diminished, the advantages remain more or less the same.

“The biggest benefit is of course that having different currencies is a kind of trade impediment and that would be eliminated, which would mean more trade, which would mean that we use our resources more efficiently, so it would give slightly higher growth over a long period, which, even if small each year, would accumulate to quite a lot in the long term.”

Recent research suggested, he added, that this effect might be more significant than people previously thought.

“Studies seem to point to much bigger effects than we expected in the 1990s. We’re talking about a 10 to 20 percent increase in trade, not from one year to another, but over a number of years,” he said.

The problem with the debate over euro membership had always been, he concluded, that the benefits and risks were of such a different character.

“You can’t really make an economic calculation, because you are comparing different things: We are comparing small, but certain positive gains – because there will be more trade that we will get slowly over years – with a risk of big macroeconomic shocks that can have huge effects over a few years.”

This makes it hard for economists to reach a firm conclusion.

“You can’t really say what is right and wrong, but I think what you can say is that the balance has shifted in the direction of being a more positive calculation for being a member today than there was 25 years ago.”

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!