Latest news with #InsideSweden
Local Sweden
3 days ago
- Politics
- Local Sweden
Inside Sweden: Why we're asking members to help The Local
The Local's editor Emma Löfgren rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter. Advertisement Hej, You may have noticed a new message to members from our co-founder, publisher and CEO, James Savage, at the bottom of articles this week. He writes: I would like to thank you for supporting The Local as a member. It's been absolutely crucial of late. But here's the thing: right now, we are facing challenges of a kind we have never experienced in our 21-year history. Global tech giants are eating up a bigger and bigger share of advertising budgets, while making us less and less visible on their platforms. That makes operating as a small player in an already challenging sector even more difficult, especially when costs are rising. Our mission has always been to help people living in another country feel at home, to champion your rights, to keep you in the loop. For us to keep doing that, we need your support. If you are able to support us further, please consider making a donation. You can click here and follow the steps to leave a donation amount that suits you. This will help keep us going and allow us to continue doing the journalism that matters to you. Every word of what James wrote is true. We've had one of our most important news cycles in the past few weeks, being the first and almost only media outlet to cover Sweden's citizenship freeze. But journalism costs money, and right now it's hard to break even as a relatively small newsroom in this world of tech giants and far bigger media actors – or even break through the noise of the domestic Swedish-language media. The biggest change in Sweden since the last election has been the government's so-called "migration paradigm shift", which has had a life-changing impact on many foreigners living and working in this country. Advertisement With just over a year to go until the next election – and less than a year until stricter citizenship laws, and possibly stricter work permit conditions, come into force – making sure those affected are actually heard in the public debate is more crucial than ever. I'd like to think we can make an impact together. Thank you for being a member. If you want to help but are not able to make a donation, please tell a friend about us and ask them to become a member. Any help we get can make a huge difference. To us as a media company, as journalists, but also to raising the voices of those who still believe in a hopeful, constructive and international vision for Sweden and the rest of the world. In other news Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, who chaired the agency managing adoptions to Sweden some 20 years ago, has said he's not ruling out an apology after an inquiry unveiled widespread abuses spanning several decades. With just over a year to go until Sweden's next election, a key poll suggests that the centre-left Social Democrats may take a decisive leap forward. Sweden's streets are filled with jubilant high school students. Why are they there, and what are they doing? This week's episode of Sweden in Focus Extra for Membership+ subscribers features an interview with Francisca Leonardo, founder of the tour company Xperience Stockholm. I really enjoyed my conversation with her. GAMES: Have you tried The Local's games for Membership+ subscribers yet? We've got a new crossword and word search puzzle out now A new agreement between Sweden and Estonia means that up to 600 criminals convicted in Sweden could serve time in prisons in Estonia, in what Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has described as a "historic" deal. Advertisement Foreign citizens are significantly over-represented in Swedish prisons. Here are some of the rules about how they should be treated. A government-commissioned inquiry this week proposed a series of suggestions that would make it cheaper to travel to Arlanda Airport. And finally, from summer activity tips to rail disruptions, here's everything you need to know about travelling in Sweden this summer. Have a good weekend, Emma Löfgren Editor, The Local Sweden Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It's published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.
Local Sweden
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Local Sweden
Inside Sweden: Sweden's citizenship news is bittersweet
The Local's deputy editor Becky Waterton rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter. Advertisement This week has been a big week for Swedish citizenship applicants, with two big pieces of news. The first is that Sweden's citizenship freeze is effectively over, and the Migration Agency confirmed to The Local on Friday that it has already started sending out letters calling for applicants to book appointments at its offices. The second big piece of news is something a lot of our readers will be very happy about – the agency has also changed the order in which it processes cases. Instead of focusing on simpler cases or cases where a request to conclude has been granted, it will now focus on cases in chronological order. For me, this news is bittersweet. That's not only for selfish reasons, like the fact that it will probably affect me negatively, and could even mean that my application is not granted by the time the new rules come into force next summer. Last week, I felt like I was days or weeks away from citizenship. Now, it feels like I could be waiting for years. Having said that, I've only been waiting since September, which is nothing compared to some applicants who have been waiting for almost six years. I welcome the agency's new prioritisation and see it as a sign that they may, finally, be listening to criticism. It's only fair that I take my place in the queue behind others who have had their applications delayed for no clear reason. Despite this, the changes do not go far enough. They do not address the issue of people being stuck in Sweden for months without their passport or permanent residency card after sending them off to the Migration Agency, with no information on when they will get them back. This uncertainty leads to missed holidays, missed weddings and funerals and missed work trips, and essentially leaves us trapped in the country due to nothing but bureaucracy. Advertisement Granted, it makes the system more transparent – at least you know your application won't be arbitrarily placed in a 'too complicated to process right now' pile – but I doubt it will get waiting times anywhere close to the six-month goal, especially with the added requirement of in-person identity checks. It also, and perhaps most crucially, does nothing to ensure that those of us who fulfil current requirements will have our applications processed in time before the new rules come into force for all applications, not just new ones, in July next year. With waiting times so long – 75 percent of recent applications were concluded within 23 months – is it even worth applying now if you don't meet the future requirements? How can you meet them when it's not possible to even take the obligatory language or culture tests yet? Now I – and many others – find myself in the strange position of hoping that the Migration Agency either approves my case within the next year, or that the process is so delayed that I end up having lived in the country for long enough to qualify under the new rules by the time I reach the top of the pile. Advertisement In other news Swedish electric car battery maker Northvolt, which filed for bankruptcy in March, will stop production at its main factory in Sweden in June, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee said earlier this week. Fifteen new flight routes are launching from Sweden this summer, including destinations in France, Spain, Turkey, Iceland and Greece. Here's a full list. Staying on the topic of flights, cabin crew on multiple airlines will strike in Sweden from Monday, if unions and airlines are unable to come to an agreement. GAMES: Have you tried The Local's games for Membership+ subscribers yet? We've got a new crossword and word search puzzle out now Sweden's work permit salary threshold is currently set as 80 percent of the most recent median salary figures, which are from June last year. When are these figures going to be updated, increasing the threshold? Two of Sweden's largest game companies, Massive Entertainment and Sharkmob, want to join together with other companies in the gaming industry to create a specialised collective bargaining agreement. Sweden has approved a law to criminalise buying sex online – including personalised digital content, like that offered on sites such as OnlyFans. Here's what it means. Advertisement Finally, our editor Emma Löfgren is running an experiment. She wants to see if she can get The Local's members to help her recruit 100 new members by the end of the month. Read her LinkedIn post here and if you have a friend, colleague or family member who might find our journalism useful, please ask them to sign up via this link. Now let's see if this actually works... Have a good weekend, Becky Waterton Deputy Editor, The Local Sweden Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It's published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.
Local Sweden
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Local Sweden
Inside Sweden: If you want citizenship to mean something, this is not how to do it
The Local's deputy editor Becky Waterton rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter. Advertisement Anyone who has been following our work here at The Local will undoubtedly know that I, along with more than 88,000 others, have a pending application for Swedish citizenship. It's impossible to be sure, but from what I can tell, my citizenship application is in the final stages. The Migration Agency asked for my passport and permanent residency card at the end of April. I sent them both in and my passport was sent back a few days later. As far as I'm aware, this means that they expect to approve my application – otherwise they would have sent my card back, too. I've only been waiting since September last year, and I'm lucky that my case is relatively straightforward. I come from a stable country, I have an accepted form of ID, and I've had a full time, permanent job for the past few years. Despite my relatively short wait, I think about my citizenship application all the time. I check my emails constantly for updates. I've spent hours in citizenship-related Facebook groups and subreddits, googling different combinations of search terms to try and figure out when people who seem to have a similar case to mine were granted citizenship. I've logged in to the Migration Agency website so often – even though they wouldn't update anything there without also sending me an email – that my browser has started suggesting it as a shortcut when I open a new window. You could probably classify my behaviour as obsessive. This week, The Local broke the story that the Migration Agency was only able to approve six applications for citizenship through naturalisation in April, because they've been ordered to carry out in-person identity checks for all applicants, but have no system in place to do so. That's a decrease of 99.8 percent on the 3,234 applications approved in March. Advertisement The 88,000 of us that are waiting for their applications to be approved have never been informed of this, never been told that our applications have essentially been put on pause with no clear date on which they will be resumed. A few years ago, delays in passport processing – at one point the closest appointments were six months away – made headlines, with Swedes complaining that they'd had to miss out on their summer trips to Thailand. For those of us waiting for citizenship, six months is nothing. Many of us were stuck in the country for longer than that while we waited for the Migration Agency to renew our residency permits. Some people have been waiting for years. A six month delay for passport renewals caused uproar. But a citizenship delay, on top of already long waiting times? You could hear a pin drop. Now that the agency has my permanent residency card, I don't even know if I can nip over to Denmark for a day trip without it. Will I miss the family reunion I have planned for the UK in July? That wedding in September? Those concert tickets for London in February? Can I leave Sweden to go back to the UK and renew my daughter's British passport next summer? And I'm lucky enough to have a job where I don't have to travel. Swedish politicians keep saying that they're tightening up the rules because 'citizenship should mean something', but I don't think they understand that anyone who has gone through this waiting game understands that perfectly well. We don't just risk missing a summer getaway to Thailand, we have to plan our entire lives around our ongoing citizenship applications. Advertisement Citizenship is the only thing we can think about. For the government, it's a bargaining chip they can use to make it look like they're tough on immigration, withholding it from people who meet all the requirements until they manage to change the rules so we don't qualify anymore. We meet the requirements. We've lived here long enough, we've paid the fee. Changing the rules to delay citizenship and try to take it away from us cheapens it, and shows that you have no idea how much it means to us. If you want citizenship to mean something, this is not the way you do it. You can hear me and my colleagues go into more detail on the citizenship freeze in this week's Sweden in Focus podcast. In other news Police in Sweden said in a press conference on Friday that there was no indication the gunman behind the Örebro campus attack in February held "xenophobic or radical views" and that he likely chose his victims at random. In a new report, the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers (SULF) has slammed the government's 'exploitative revolving door' migration policy, arguing that it harms international researchers and denies them stability in the country. Advertisement Proposed new rules could lead to a sixfold increase in the number of foreigners sentenced to deportation for committing crimes in Sweden, a government-commissioned inquiry believes. GAMES: Have you tried The Local's games for Membership+ subscribers yet? We've got a new crossword and word search puzzle out now The Eurovision final is set to take place on Saturday night. Groans and giggles typically greet voters at the contest, loved and mocked for its kitsch music and seemingly partisan outcomes. But what are the voting patterns, and what external factors help explain them? The Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU) has warned that large parts of southern Sweden are at risk of a groundwater shortage after a particularly dry autumn and spring. What does this mean, and how can you prepare for it? A new report from Public Housing Sweden has shown that waiting times for first-hand rentals in Stockholm county are the longest in the country, at over 28 years ‒ that's more than four times as long as the next-highest region. The same report revealed that while some areas have long queues, others have empty apartments ready to move into straight away. Finally, we have another My Swedish Career interview, this time with Syrian-Swedish journalist and filmmaker Jamil Walli, who moved to Sweden in 2013 as an exchange student, later moving into filmmaking. We spoke to him about his life in Sweden, as well as how the attitude towards immigrants has changed since he first arrived. Have a good weekend, Becky Waterton Deputy Editor, The Local Sweden Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It's published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.
Local Sweden
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Local Sweden
Inside Sweden: Our interview with Migration Minister Johan Forssell
The Local's editor Emma Löfgren rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter. Advertisement Hej, On Wednesday morning I happened to spot that Migration Minister Johan Forssell was going to Malmö in southern Sweden, where the majority of our reporters, including deputy editor Becky Waterton, are currently based. The questions we usually manage to ask Forssell tend to come at the end of a long press conference when he is tired of answering questions from reporters and his press secretary is keen to whisk him off to the next event, so we often don't get a lot of minutes to press him on issues that matter to our readers. It perhaps sounds counter-intuitive, but when ministers are out of Stockholm, they usually have more time, so Becky called his press secretary to ask if we could get a sit-down interview with the minister on Wednesday afternoon. The answer was yes – success! So we sent Becky down to Region Skåne's International Office in Malmö, which Forssell was visiting to find out more about their work to help healthcare workers with foreign qualifications have their credentials approved, where she managed to get 15 minutes with him. She asked readers on LinkedIn if they had any questions for Forssell, and I think managed to put most of them to him. Here's the full interview – and I'd be really interested in hearing your opinions about what he said. Please feel free to comment under the article or send us an email to share your thoughts. He also confirmed that the government hasn't yet made a formal decision to raise the work permit salary threshold to 100 percent of the median salary. It was already looking pretty obvious that it wasn't going to happen by June 1st anyway, which had been the original plan. Question is: will it happen at all? You can also listen to some of the interview (and our analysis of what he had to say) in the latest episode of The Local's Sweden in Focus podcast. Advertisement In other news Sweden is considering making it harder for foreigners to qualify for social insurance, including parental benefits and child support, with an inquiry proposing tougher rules. I dug into what the inquiry actually means for our readers, which turned out to be a more difficult task than I thought. We also got hold of new figures from the Swedish Migration Agency this week, which suggest that the awarding of citizenships has slowed down radically since the government ordered it to impose stricter security checks at the start of April. Sweden has launched a number of initiatives in recent months aimed at foreign researchers, but what do researchers themselves think Sweden should be doing to make the country a more attractive choice for academics? Sweden's ROT deduction, which gives you a discount on household renovations, will go up on May 12th. How does it work, and what else can you get deductions for? We've done our best to explain it in this article. Advertisement Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson just can't catch a break when it comes to his national security advisers, as the latest one quit before even starting his job after the DN daily revealed he had failed to disclose Grindr pictures. Stockholm officials are hitting back after the US embassy wrote to the city council's planning office, demanding it sign a contract confirming that it does not work to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). This week's episode of Sweden in Focus Extra for Membership+ subscribers features an interview with Jamil Walli, a Syrian-Swedish painter and filmmaker. And finally: The Local's new puzzles are out! Don't miss our crossword, which looks at the week that's just been, and don't miss our new word search either. Have a great weekend, Emma Löfgren Editor, The Local Sweden Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It's published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.
Local Sweden
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Local Sweden
Inside Sweden: Why so much is at stake in this weekend's party leader debate
The Local's editor Emma Löfgren rounds up the biggest stories of the week in our Inside Sweden newsletter. Advertisement Hej, Sweden's Agenda news programme regularly organises party leader debates where the leaders of the eight parties go head to head on key issues. The next one is set to take place on Sunday. It's in Swedish, but if you understand Swedish you can watch it on SVT2 at 8pm or via SVT Play. It's an important one, at least for the party leaders themselves, as we've got just over a year to go until the next election – and several of the parties are hovering below or just above the four-percent parliamentary threshold. The latest opinion poll from this week by public radio broadcaster Sveriges radio and pollsters Indikator put the Liberals and Christian Democrats (both members of the right-wing government) at 2.8 and 3.0 percent, respectively. The Centre Party (whose allegiance is sort of centre-left at the moment, but if their relationship with the Social Democrats – the leading party of the centre-left opposition – were a Facebook status, it would read "it's complicated") got 4.1 percent in the same poll, which puts it above the threshold but is hardly reassuring, especially at such a tumultuous time for the party. The topics to be discussed are the economy, crime, the climate and a new world order (with the latter presumably focusing on Donald Trump). Anna-Karin Hatt, who is expected to officially take over as Centre Party leader from Muharrem Demirok today, will be thrown straight into the deep end – which may work in her favour, as she'll have at least a decent excuse for not yet having an answer to those questions the Centre Party doesn't really want to answer about who it is going to side with after the next election. Advertisement Liberal leader Johan Pehrson, who will formally step down next month, will this time around be replaced by the party's second deputy chair, Fredrik Malm. I try not to write too much about "the political game" as I believe focusing on the issues that affect our readers is a better use of my time, but in this case it will be interesting to see who makes the biggest impression in the debate. In other news New puzzles are out! This week our crossword will be looking at the week just been, plus a helpful dose of general knowledge, and our word search will be on something many high school students are thinking about this time of the year. Sweden has a "relatively weak brand" in India, and to the extent that it is known at all, the country is not associated with having a stable economy or being a good place to study, visit, invest or do business, a new report has found. Two senior Swedish ministers have been out in the press this week trying to boost the country's reputation among international talent. Advertisement Trade minister Benjamin Dousa called for Sweden to strengthen its image as an "open and freedom-loving country" which welcomes foreigners who want to start businesses or develop their careers, throwing out a welcome mat to victims of Hungary's Pride ban. And Migration Minister Johan Forsell told the Expressen tabloid that the government is planning to step up its efforts to make the country more attractive to highly skilled labour migrants if it wins the next election. Swedish-Finnish humour trio KAJ's Bara Bada Bastu has emerged as an unexpected favourite to win the 2025 Eurovision Song Local has done a line-by-line translation of the lyrics, so that you know what you're singing about when it's stuck in your head (which will inevitably happen). Speaking of bastu, Richard spoke to an expert to find out more about proper sauna etiquette in Sweden (should you or shouldn't you be naked?). Thanks for reading and have a great weekend, Emma Löfgren Editor, The Local Sweden Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members which gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It's published each Saturday and with Membership+ you can also receive it directly to your inbox.
