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Swedes Cool On Euro
Despite threats from big business and pleas from Euro-leaders, Swedish voters are looking decidedly cool on the prospect of entering the European single currency.
Also: France chooses Unions over EU.
According to the latest opinion polls, almost half of Sweden's voters oppose Eurozone entry, while just over one third will vote for the Euro. This comes as European Commission president Romano Prodi urged Swedes to support their government, which has been eager to join the Eurozone.
Also joining the debate was the director of mobile phone company (and one of Sweden's biggest businesses) Eriksson. The company's CEO, Carl-Henric Svanberg, warned voters that Eriksson would be forced to move investments outside Sweden if the country was to reject the single currency - a threat not unlike the warning issued to Scottish workers in the early 1990s by another big business, suggesting that their jobs would be at risk if they were to vote Labour or Scottish Nationalist.
Such scare tactics and blackmail are said to be the preserve of the 'emotional' anti-Euro side. Nevertheless, they are often effective. They'll have to be, if the Swedish premier Goran Persson is to claw back support for the Euro by September 14, when the country goes to the polls.
Despite the support of Sweden's business establishment, much of the media and many of the country's most prominent politicans, opposition to the Euro comes from all angles. The left, including many in Mr Persson's own party, believe that Sweden's remarkably generous welfare state is at risk.
The prime minister banned his party colleagues from speaking out against the Euro, but at least five plan to voice their misgivings.
Many in the business community are concerned by the Eurozone's continuing economic decline. Things are not helped by France and Germany's flouting of the stability pact, cornerstone of Eurozone economic policy. As Philip Delves Broughton points out in today's Telegraph, Swedes must be wondering what the stability pact is worth if large Euro economies like France can openly and deliberately break its rules. Those countries pondering Euro entry must be wondering, he writes, "Which kind of flexibility is better? The flexibility of staying out or the flexibility of joining and then ignoring the rules?"
Postscript: Delves Broughton's article confirms that France will be ignoring the terms of the stability pact for the next two years at least. As predicted by EURSOC earlier this week, it is likely that the French government will use pressure from unions as an excuse for breaking the terms of the pact.
"M Chirac made an obvious calculation. As he considered reforming the French state and cutting taxes, he asked: "Who is more likely to cause me trouble? The French unions or Romano Prodi?"
Mr Prodi, for all his gifts, has no record of stopping trains, closing schools, smothering Paris in tear-gas and turfing out Right-wing governments."
