STOCKHOLM – Find me a Swede who is holidaying abroad this summer and I’ll eat my newspaper. The Swedish prime minister, Goran Persson, for one, cycled round the countryside with his new girlfriend, appropriately enough the head of the country’s government-controlled alcohol monopoly that runs the system of wine and beer shops that makes sure the average Swede can’t just decide to have a drink and easily reach for one. This is the European country that along with France loves itself the most, is comfortable in its old ways, is wedded to its welfare state that produces an ultra healthy population that claims more sick leave days than anybody else’s, that invariably manages, as it does today, to pull handsome economic growth out of a hat in spite of dire predictions of creeping sclerosis, which heads the Western divorce rate league, accepts late teenage sex unblinkingly and yet, as the other above virtues give testament to, walks in the pathways of its self-disciplined, Lutheran traditions seemingly happily.
The result: a feeling that the country will always do quite well on its own, thank you very much – despite having more multinational corporations per head than any other country and where even the garbage men speak passable English – and thus, say the pundits, provides an electorate that is unlikely to say “yes” to the Euro in the referendum Persson has called in six weeks’ time and on behalf of which belatedly – for the Swedish holidays are so extraordinary long it is best not to get ill at this time when the hospitals are irresponsibly understaffed – he has begun a short and, one assumes, a sharp campaign to persuade the reluctant Swedes to change their minds.
Sweden’s introversion can be quite charming when the sun is shining, as it has this summer almost every day. The coast line is long, the country is stuffed with lakes and the population, despite a rising tide of refugees to this arms-wide-open society that likes to do good, small enough at 9 million for every Swede to have his (or her) own fifty meters of lake side or sea side paradise and more likely than not his own summer house. (And if foreigners were clever, could turn their backs on overheated, southern Europe and wanted to buy into this, they would find they could still do it for peanuts.) But the other side of it is an almost aching shyness that makes friendship hard and uphill work, a winter so long and dark that even those with a benign genetic inheritance can become depressed and where the national mood can be described as melancholic, as the writings of Strindberg and Stig Dagerman, the music of Stenhammar, the films of Ingmar Bergman and the poetry of Transtromer readily attest.
Yet the very self-absorption and quasi-isolationism of Sweden is Persson’s trump card. The Swedes are almost Japanese when it comes to political debate – it is the European consensus society par excellence. Not for nothing has the country been ruled by a single party – the Social Democrats for 62 of the last 71 years – and politics (and law) shun the adversarial style dominant in the Anglo-Saxon world. Apart from making divorce cheap, it also means that political arguments rarely are allowed to run away with themselves, a midway is instinctively reached for, and those who are supposed to know about something (in this case the politicians) are listened to with an attentiveness that ensures that when the Swede enters the privacy of the polling booth his own instincts about what he would like to do can be subordinated to what he has been convinced is the right thing to do.
Besides, Persson is a popular man. In Swedish front line politics he has no peer. He excels in political management, he has enormous natural charisma, he speaks and argues well but, unlike his slain charismatic predecessor, Olof Palme, who also exhibited similar characteristics, he does not exude effortless superiority, a most unSwedish thing in a nation that prides itself on not encouraging the applauding of individual success.
Swedes are being told two, for them, important things. First, that the forthcoming Euro referenda in Denmark and the UK will be profoundly influenced by what the Swedish electorate decides. And, as a corollary to this: Swedes will not be able to look themselves in the mirror if they effectively take the lead in dividing Europe at a crucial, unsettled time. Rather, their historic role is to help cement the countries of Europe together and to bequeath to a war torn continent another virtue that the Swedes for 190 years have been rather good at – the avoidance of war. The Euro, Persson, is going to say again and again, is not so much about economics but about peace and security, about, as he said on Sunday, creating “a better continent”. And there is still a good chance he will win his “yes”.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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