Jacob Christensen

What is the best way to celebrate – eh – is the correct title “Nation Day”, “Day of the Swedish Flag” or something else?

The Swedes themselves seem a bit unsure. After all, June 6 is a new public holiday: It was only introduced as such last year and I’m not quite sure if the real objective was to save a bank holiday by abolishing Whit Monday or to enhance patriotism among Swedes.

In any event, it was a top-down decision and as it doesn’t provide an acceptable excuse for binge drinking (unlike Valpurgis Day, Midsummer Day and All Saints’ Day where the natives make a truly concerted effort to kill any cells that may remain in their brains), June 6 still occupies a rather uncertain place in the calendar.

In any event, the Swedish tabloid Expressen took the day as an excuse to provide us with yet another of those fascinating self-tests, this time on the topic “Are you a true Swede“?

The answer in my case is – not in any way: I only managed to give a “Swedish” answer to two out of ten questions. The paper suggests that I ought to emigrate to Norway.

It may be worth noticing that when I tried the German citizenship test which Süddeutsche Zeitung published on its homepage some months ago, the result was a perfectly acceptable 18 out of 20 corrects answers. Maybe Danes are in fact more Continental than Scandinavians.

And no: I do not entertain any plans about moving to Norway.

As we all know by now, the much-heralded “Third Way” (aka “New Labour”) turned out to be nothing more than New Public Management with a spice of Neo-Conservatism added.

Consequently, we should not be surprised when the ultimate pragmatic centrist third way-party – the Danish Social-Liberal Party – now has declared that it will promote the Politics of the Other Way.

Just a late note about the Swedish Green Party’s conference last week-end. The most noteworthy event was that the delegates voted for a declaration that the party should consider all possible coalitions – that meant one possibly including the Swedish Conservative Party.

This follows some positioning regarding possible cooperations after the September elections. The Left Party famously threatened to bring down a Social-Democratic led coalition which didn’t include the Leftists.

Another issue worth mentioning is the party’s stance on EU membership. In its original version section 30 of the proposed election platform called for a rejection of the EU constitution and the development of a different kind of European cooperation.

In the end, the party’s governing committee in a pre-emptive move decided to change the formulation to a demand for a referendum on the European constitution and Swedish withdrawal from the EU.

How a rejection of Swedish EU membership could possibly be combined with entering a coalition with the Conservative Party stretches my imagination. How this outright rejection of Sweden’s membership of the EU will affect the Green Party’s chances in the negotiations about the formation of a new government after the September elections remains to be seen.