Most Swedes are still in shock from the hideous murder of their country’s foreign minister, Anna Lindh, but the government has said, quite rightly, that the Euro referendum will still take place on Sunday. The no camp was well ahead before the attack on Ms. Lindh (who was the most popular advocate of the single European currency in Sweden), but the likely result now is far less clear, although the best guess is still that the Euro will – as it should – be rejected.
Meanwhile, the Guardian has an interesting and subtly written piece today on the situation in Sweden. This extract, in particular, is worth pondering:
“Something remarkable emerged in Sweden’s euro debate, the crystallisation of a new set of political dividing lines, in which right-wing and left-wing activists find themselves in alliance against powerful, cross-border, private-public bureaucracies. On one side, the small, the local, the personal, the individual, the accessible, the familiar, the inherited; on the other, the big, the transnational, the impersonal, the mass, the remote, the alien, the acquired.”