Sweden’s right-wing coalition last week urged the EU to suspend trade ties with Israel as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepened, but the government’s toughening stance on Tel Aviv has not gone down well with its parliamentary backers, the far-right Sweden Democrats.
Over the past two years Sweden’s government has mostly remained cautiously supportive of Israel, reiterating the country’s right to defend itself after the terror attacks of October 2023.
But speaking at the government’s annual ‘summer fika’ last week, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard revealed that the government had now decided to align itself with a growing list of EU countries calling for a freeze on trade with Israel.
This marked a swift turnaround: just two weeks earlier the foreign minister indicated that Sweden wasn’t going to take a position on trade with Israel before the EU Commission had put forward concrete proposals on any changes to the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
But fresh reports of increasingly dire conditions in Gaza, including images of starving and dying children, prompted a rethink. “Using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare constitutes a war crime,” Malmer Stenergard told reporters.
READ ALSO: How Israel’s invasion of Gaza became Swedish party politics again
While all three parties in the governing coalition backed the move, the issue is a sensitive one for Sweden’s right-wing parties, which all have traditions of supporting Israel.
Not surprisingly then, there were some dissenting voices.
For instance, the combative Christian Democrat MEP Alice Teodorescu Måwe said the government was playing into the hands of Hamas and the Islamist extremist movement’s plan to discredit and eventually destroy Israel.
This view was shared by Carl Johan Sonesson, a high-profile Moderate from Skåne, who argued that the EU should spend more time trying to end the war by putting pressure on Hamas to release Israeli hostages.
But by far the most column inches have been devoted to criticism of the government by Jimmie Åkesson.
Writing on X, the Sweden Democrat leader said: “If we had known that the government would be this wavering and weak on Middle East policy we would of course have also demanded foreign policy guarantees in the Tidö Agreement.”
But while Åkesson might come across as agitated, this difference of opinion is arguably no bad thing for the far-right party as it seeks to position itself ahead of the 2026 election.
The fact that foreign policy isn’t included in the agreement underpinning his party’s collaboration with the government gives Åkesson relatively free rein to go it alone without jeopardising an arrangement that has run fairly smoothly so far. It also offers him a chance to convince core voters that the Sweden Democrats have not become part of an establishment they profess to despise.
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Prime Minister uses ChatGPT to test new ideas
Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson revealed in a weekend interview with Dagens Industri that he often uses open AI services like ChatGPT as a testing ground for new ideas.
Kristersson said he likes to present an idea as a way of getting a second opinion by asking for further thoughts and counterarguments.
This has become a snackis, or talking point, in recent days, as opinion shapers weigh in on whether it’s a good idea for the Prime Minister to be using AI in this way.
In the culture pages of Dagens Nyheter, Kristofer Ahlström questions the wisdom of using Chat GPT, a service that he says is widely considered a “sycophant and bootlicker in its desire to please”.
Others however have leapt to the PM’s defence, including Elias Rosell in the same newspaper: “It’s akin to someone in 2000 criticising a head of government for occasionally using the then new internet tool Google to search for information instead of dusting off a reference book.”
READ ALSO: Can Kristersson convince Swedish voters to give him a second term?
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