The view from our apartment where we can enjoy the Swedish summer
Ah the Swedish summer. Right now I’m looking out of my apartment over a dark blue lake twenty minutes outside of Stockholm. Swedish summers are hard to beat. Long days, lots of flowers and berries and swimming just about everywhere. Oh, and almost everyone goes on vacation.
A couple of weeks ago one of my workmates told me she was going to Greece, but “just for two and a half weeks”, she said. I told her only in Europe could you say “just” and then follow it up with two and a half weeks.
It’s been such an amazing summer you would hardly know that there was a fierce election battle coming up September 19.
On one side you have the center-right governing alliance made up of four parties. They are slightly ahead in the polls. On the other side the so-called red-green coalition made up of three left leaning parties. Experts believe it is going to be a tight race all the way to the end.
The center-right alliance, led by the Moderate party, now Sweden’s biggest political party according to polling, has cut income taxes during their four years in power. Cutting taxes is kind of their mantra. But they have now promised, just months before the election, to spend more on welfare and to skip tax cuts at least for 2011.
The opposition alliance led by the Social Democrats has promised to spend even more money than the governing alliance on welfare, and to raise taxes, to in part help out struggling municipalities.
You get the sense here that the calm Swedish summer is going to give way to a feisty couple of months leading up to the election.
I’ll keep reporting on the developments leading up to the election this September.
