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Abba tells Trump to stop using their music after he plays ‘Winner Takes It All’

The Swedish band Abba have asked US presidential candidate Donald Trump not to use their music after their hit 'The Winner Takes it All' was played at a rally in Minnesota.

Published: 29 August 2024 11:45 CEST

Abba tells Trump to stop using their music after he plays 'Winner Takes It All'

Donald Trump holds a rally in Arizona on August 24th. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP/TT

“Together with the members of ABBA, we have discovered that videos have been released where ABBAs music/videos has been used at Trump events, and we have therefore requested that such use be immediately removed and taken down,” a spokesperson from Universal Music, Abba’s record company, told The Local.

“Universal Music Publishing AB and Polar Music International AB have not received any request, so no permission or license has been granted to Trump.”

A reporter for SvD was at a Trump rally in St Cloud, Minnesota, in July, and witnessed the 1980 hit being played to a crowd of 8,000 of Trump’s supporters.

The spokesperson would not comment on whether the Abba members had any political objection to their music being used by Trump or the Republican Party, or on whether Universal had any grounds to request royalties or any right to ban a candidate from using their music at a rally.

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Politics in Sweden: Will a U-turn on biofuels win the government back green voters?

It was, Sweden’s climate minister Romina Pourkokhtari said, a “golden solution”.

For Energy Minister Ebba Busch, it showed that the government had “pulled off the trick of both making it cheaper to be Swedish AND meeting our climate goals”.

What it definitely was not, asserted Martin Kinnunen, the energy spokesperson for the far-right Sweden Democrats, was “a reintroduction of the old biofuels obligation of the Social Democrats and the Green Party”.

Two years after Sweden’s government announced plans to scrap the reduktionsplikt or “biofuels obligation”, the central plank of its predecessor’s plan to cut emissions from transport, it has reintroduced something that looks very similar indeed.

At a press conference on Tuesday, the government said that the biofuels obligation, which in January it said would be reduced to 6 percent between this year and 2026 before being scrapped entirely, will instead rise to 10 percent next year. The difference is that electricity sold by fuel retailers will also now count, as well as biofuels.

You might think the opposition would be overjoyed to see the government fall back on their own favoured solution. But instead they dug in the knife.

“Ebba Busch and Romina Pourmokhtari are trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes and hide the fact that they don’t have a plan to handle the green transition,” said the Green Party’s joint leader, Daniel Helldén.

Rickard Nordin, the climate spokesman for the Centre Party, accused the government of “fiddling with the figures”, and continuing with their “climate betrayal”.

The move certainly underlines the government’s total failure to come up with a credible replacement for the obligation, which forces fuel retailers to increase the share of biofuels blended in with their fuels.

Then when the government agreed to cut the obligation in May last year, the leaders of all four pro-government parties wrote a joint article dismissing the obligation as “not an effective measure to promote the transition”, and “artificial respiration for an outdated technology”.

Now they are bringing it back.

Busch put the U-turn down to a change in EU rules which meant that member states could include electricity in their obligation regime, but that is hardly likely to satisfy the supporters who have been told for years that the obligation was a terrible idea.

The thing is that the U-turn doesn’t go far enough to win back green voters in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö either.

As the government plans to simultaneously cut tax on petrol to stop the increased share of biofuels increasing costs at the pump, the renewed biofuels obligation is only expected to cut emissions by 2 billion tonnes between now and 2030. The reductions in the obligation that have come into force since 2022 will, on the other hand, increase emissions by an estimated 50 billion tonnes over the same period.

Busch claimed in the press conference that the return of the biofuels obligation would allow Sweden to meet its EU climate goals in 2030 and 2045. But this was immediately dismissed by experts.

“We don’t believe that’s the case,” said Matthias Goldmann, chief executive of The Swedish 2030-secretariat, which is responsible for pushing Sweden’s towards meeting its 2030 transport emissions goal. “It’s a long way short of what’s needed either to meet our own climate goals or those of the EU.”

Will the government go even further in 2026 and beyond? Now it has put the biofuels obligation back on the table, it at least has a tool to cut emissions should it decide to use it in future.

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