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POLITICS

Youths turn their backs on politics

The number of young people actively involved in Sweden's political parties has collapsed since 1990. Total membership of parties' youth movements has fallen from 100,000 in 1990 to just 20,000 today.

Published: 6 August 2007 12:21 CEST

The scandal-hit Social Democrat youth movement, SSU, has lost 20,000 members since the early nineties, Aftonbladet reports. The Centre Party youth wing (CUF) has seen membership fall by 15,000, the Moderates’ are down 12,000 and the Liberals’ are down 9,000.

The apparent fall-off in interest could partly be down to the figures having previously been exaggerated, but the paper reports that a large number of members are believed to have left the organizations.

The youth sections of the Left and Green parties did not submit complete information to the paper, and were therefore not included in the comparison.

POLITICS

Sweden Democrats threaten government crisis over biofuels obligation

The far-right Sweden Democrats are threatening to push Sweden's three-party ruling coalition into a political crisis as they fail to reach agreement over how drastically to cut the country's biofuels obligation, a key part in its plan to reduce emissions.

Published: 23 March 2023 16:19 CET
Sweden Democrats threaten government crisis over biofuels obligation

The party is claiming that a pledge in the Tidö Agreement calling for the biofuels obligation, or reduktionsplikt, to be cut to the “lowest EU level”, should mean that the amount of biofuels that must be blended into petrol and diesel and Sweden should be cut to close to zero, rather than to about half the current share, as suggested by ongoing EU negotiations. 

“We are being tough in the negotiations because of the power we have as the biggest party in this bloc,” Oscar Sjöstedt, the party’s finance spokesperson told TV4. “There is going to be a change at the end of the year that is going to be pretty significant and substantial, that I’m 99.9 percent certain about, otherwise we will have a government crisis.” 

The Liberal Party is pushing for a much less severe reduction, perhaps to a little more than half the current level, where 30.5 percent of all petrol and diesel must be biofuel. 

“We have signed up to a temporary reduction in the biofuels obligation, and it’s clear that that is what we are going to do, but zero is not an alternative for us,” the Liberal Party’s leader Johan Pehrson told TV4.

The decision to reduce the amount of biofuel in the mix at Swedish pumps has made it much more difficult for Sweden to meet its targets for emissions reductions, putting pressure on Pehrson’s colleague, Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari. 

Next Wednesday, Pourmokhtari will have to defend the extent to which her government’s policies have pushed Sweden away from being able to meet its 2045 target of net zero emissions when the The Swedish Climate Policy Council reports on the country’s progress towards its target. 

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