SAS unions to call strike at midday if no deal is reached 

Scandinavian airline SAS has until midday on Monday to reach an agreement with pilot unions in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, if it wants to avoid a strike that could see as many as 30,000 passengers stranded each day. 

Talks were extended over the weekend, after a deadline of midnight on Friday was reached without a deal. 

On Sunday, Jan Levi Skogvang, head of SAS’s Norwegian pilot union, said that there had at least been progress. 

“We are working at a good tempo, so there’s at least some movement and good will on both sides,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there’s agreement on everything. There are a still a lot of points that need to get solved.” 

SAS’s negotiations chief said that the two sides still “stand a lot way from one another”.

Swedish Vocab: en tidsfrist – a deadline 

Swedish PM makes nationalist speech at Almedalen festival

Swedish Prime Minister Sweden’s prime minister went all out with a strongly nationalist message in her speech at the Almedalen political festival, presenting the Social Democrats as defenders of Swedish values the right-wing parties seek to destroy.

“I love Sweden and I’m proud to be Swedish,” she declared, while acknowledging that it was unusual in Sweden to express your love for your country, in such a bold, heart-on-sleeve, way. 

It wasn’t just the country she loved, she went on, but its values, of “thoroughness, duty, and common sense”, of equality, the rule of law, and social trust. 

“We are a country where men take child leave and look after children, a country where women work, and can become prime minister,” she said, to a loud round of applause. 

She then painted a grim picture of the country’s future, “if the right-wing conservative parties get to rule”. 

“Sweden will become something different,” she said. “A Sweden where one group is set against another, one person against another. A country where social divisions grow and polarisation increases, where the number of luxury yachts rises but the number of school counsellors falls, where trust is eroded, both for one another and for society.” 

“The right-wing conservatives say they want to preserve our country, but in reality,” she warned, “they want to attack exactly those things we love about Sweden.”

Swedish Vocab: noggrannheten – thoroughness, accuracy

Property prices fall in June across Sweden 

On Sunday Sweden’s Prime Minister refused to deny Turkey’s claim that it had promised to deport individuals as part of Stockholm’s efforts to join Nato.

Despite questioning by journalists and concerns among Kurdish and Turkish refugees in Sweden, Andersson would not say whether such a commitment had been given to Ankara for it to lift objections to Sweden’s membership.

“I’ve been a minister for eight years and I never talked about what is said in the negotiation room,” she said. “(That) actually puts me in a bit of a difficult situation right now,” she added.

In an agreement signed by Stockholm and Helsinki at a NATO summit in Madrid on Tuesday, the two Nordic countries agreed to examine Turkish extradition requests “expeditiously and thoroughly”.

No promise has been given to actually carry out the extraditions, and Finland and Sweden have since recalled that the process is in the hands of the authorities and independent courts.

Swedish Vocab: i förhandlingsrum – at the negotatiating table 

Swedish PM pledges to ban profit making at free schools

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson has pledged to stop companies withdrawing profits from schools, in what is likely to be one of the Social Democrats’ main campaigning issues in the coming election campaign.

The proposal, one of three measures announced to “take back democratic control over the school system”, was launched on the first day of the Almedalen political festival on the island of Gotland.

Banning profits from schools is an obvious campaigning issue for the Social Democrats. The latest poll by Gothenburg University’s SOM Institute found that fully 67 percent of voters support such a ban.

The only issue is that the Centre Party, whose support the Social Democrats will need to form a government, is likely to block a future Social Democrat government from implementing it, something Andersson acknowledged

“What I know is that there’s a very strong support for this among the Swedish people, but not in the Swedish parliament,” she said. 

Read our story here. 

Swedish Vocab: ett kryphål – a loophole

.