MALMO, 6 September 2003 — Mette Thorsen is going to take some convincing to vote yes in Sweden’s euro referendum, which is now heading toward a nail-biting finish and being watched closely across the continent. Weeks of campaigning have left this Malmo schoolteacher, and one in five of the seven million-strong Swedish electorate, deeply uncertain as to whether or not the national currency, the krona, should be scrapped.
With just nine days left before “e-day”, Ms. Thorsen is typical of public sector employees all over Scandinavia’s biggest country. “I’m really confused about this issue,” Ms. Thorsen admits. “It’s so complex and so hard to know what’s right.”
The reason for such indecision is clear in nearby Gustav Adolfs Square, where arguments for and against Europe’s single currency are being aired from two small, cosy huts. Yes activists are handing out ja lapel badges, cakes, chocolate and euro coins and explaining why entering euroland will be good for jobs, trade, growth and welfare.
A short distance away volunteers for the no vote, working in a dilapidated eggshell-blue hut, warn that jobs, welfare and democracy will suffer if Sweden signs up to a project backed by big business serving a European “superstate”.
Posters against inclusion show a hooded grim reaper with a euro-shaped scythe, a monstrous euro-fish swallowing a Swedish minnow, and a couple tied helplessly to a railway track, one saying: “We mustn’t miss the euro train.”
Another poster depicts an exhausted nurse — a symbol of the country’s fabled but declining health service — complaining: “For some people the euro is about changing money more easily. But most of us don’t have enough money in the first place.”
The backdrop is a Nordic civic idyll: Fountains, flower stalls, elegant Hanseatic buildings and neat bike racks on the cobbled square, all bathed in autumn sunshine. But there is an unmistakably hard edge to the debate: Rival canvassers recently came to blows in Gothenburg and the yes campaign has been accused of using scare tactics.
Opinion polls show the no side with a shrinking lead of between five and 10 points. But the final few days could be as crucial as they were in 1994, when Swedes voted by 53 percent to 47 percent to join the EU, though the polls had predicted a no almost until the end. Voters saying no may simply stay at home on Sept. 14.
Sweden’s big decision matters abroad too: A no could destroy Goran Persson, the bullish Social Democratic prime minister. But it will make life a little less lonely for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is now unlikely to hold a euro referendum in the UK during the lifetime of the present British Parliament. It will also affect the debate in neighboring Denmark, which rejected the euro three years ago.
Further afield a no will undermine confidence in the 12-member eurozone at a time of mounting concern over ballooning French and German budget deficits and sluggish growth everywhere.
Yes campaigners should be winning the argument in Malmo, where export, service and hi-tech industries have replaced the old shipyards and heavy plants. Copenhagen is just half an hour away and northern Germany not much further. There is a large multicultural population, with referendum material distributed in Arabic, Farsi, Spanish and Serbo-Croat.
“Malmo has more connections with what Swedes call the continent than anywhere else,” said Alf Paulson, a businessman.
The city’s Social Democratic mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, said: “This is the right moment for Sweden to go in to the euro. But I am not confident of victory.”
Corporations such as the telecoms giant Ericsson, big players in the EU’s single market, are solidly in favor of membership, citing exchange rate stability, increased trade and inward investment. They have bankrolled the yes campaign massively.
Opposition to the euro is a mixture of economics, nostalgia and nationalism, the same brew familiar from EU referendums in Ireland and Denmark, and in Britain’s half-baked euro debate.
That sense of having much to lose is the key to understanding anti-euro voters.
