Sweden in Focus

Get Membership+ to listen to all The Local's podcasts Sweden in Focus Extra is a podcast for The Local's Membership+ subscribers. Sign up to Membership+ now and get early, ad-free access to a full-length episode of the Sweden in Focus podcast every weekend, as well as Sweden in Focus Extra every Wednesday. Please visit the link that applies to you and get a 40% discount on Membership+ For signed-i...

Get Membership+ to listen to all The Local's podcasts Sign up now and get early, ad-free access to a full-length episode of the Sweden in Focus podcast every weekend, as well as Sweden in Focus Extra every Wednesday. Please visit the link that applies to you and get a 40% discount on Membership+ For signed-in members: Upgrade to Membership+ For new members: Get Membership+  Read more about Me...

Instead of a news roundup Sweden in Focus this week consists of a conversation with a journalist who has contributed several articles to The Local recently charting the immigrant experience.  Faisal Khan ended up in Sweden after life in Afghanistan became "unbearable" for him and his family. It was a country he knew little about but soon came to appreciate. Despite a rise in anti-immigrant rh...

Join us for an end-of-year quiz as we look back at the stories that shaped Sweden in 2025.  Host Paul O’Mahony is joined this week by The Local's Becky Waterton, Richard Orange and James Savage.  The year kicked off with revelations that Sweden's national security advisor had mislaid highly sensitive documents and ended with the country's right-wing leaders meeting in the Prime Minister'...

In this week's episode we talk about Christmas and how to celebrate like a Swede. We also discuss why prominent Moderate Party politicians are arguing amongst themselves about the merits of government policies that are forcing immigrants with jobs to leave the country. For Membership+ subscribers we look at the economic forecast for Sweden in 2026, which will also be a useful barometer to gau...

Voters in Sweden will decide next year whether to keep the current coalition government bolstered by the far-right Sweden Democrats or switch to a more left-leaning alternative. The Local’s Nordic editor Richard Orange caught up recently with Jonas Hinnfors , a political science professor at Lund University, to get his predictions for the year ahead.   Can the right-wing parties claw bac...

In this week's episode we talk about why immigrants in Sweden are often lumped into categories and what needs to be done to forge real connections, and we look at what Indian readers are telling us about their relationship with Sweden. Also, after the United States released a national security strategy that sent shockwaves through Europe, we examine what commentators are saying about the potential...

In this week’s episode of Sweden in Focus Extra, we hear from the Umeå-based Canadian writer. Mandy Pipher about what it's been like moving to Umeå in northern Sweden.  Mandy wrote recently in an article for The Local about the ignorance and prejudices people from Norrland often face about a region that makes up more than half of Sweden’s surface area.  We wanted to catch up with her to...

In this week's episode we talk about why northern Sweden doesn’t get the recognition it deserves from southerners, and we prepare for the annual Lucia festivities by getting to know some of the most common songs that are sung to mark the day. For membership+ subscribers we find out why Swedish publishers have reported Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the police. Finally we examine how new Swedi...

Can our panelists pass the vocabulary section of högskoleprovet, the Swedish university entrance exam? Host Paul O’Mahony is joined this week by The Local's Becky Waterton and James Savage . Do you know what a nässeldjur is? None of our panelists did. Tune in to see how you fare in our multiple-choice quiz.  Already a Membership+ subscriber? Make sure to activate Sweden in Focus Extra via the...

In this week's episode we talk about Sweden’s immigrant deportation centres and why reports of miserable conditions there should concern everyone in Sweden. We also discuss the two-decades old murder in a religious sect of a pastor’s wife in a case that gripped Sweden for months at the time.  With 2026 nearly upon us, we hear some of The Local’s readers’ predictions for what next will bring....

In this week’s episode we hear a conversation our Nordic editor Richard Orange had recently with Sasan Kazemian, an Iranian doctor who quit his job and left Sweden for Iran in September after he was refused a work permit extension. We’ve spoken to him previously for the podcast and wanted to catch up again to find out about his application to return to Sweden on a Blue Card visa. But any hopes he...

In this week's episode we talk about strategies for coping with the long Swedish winter now that temperatures have taken a serious nosedive. In politics, with several parties teetering on the brink of the parliamentary threshold, we examine what happens to their votes if they don’t quite make it. For Membership+ subscribers, we discuss new figures from the Migration Agency confirming a major slowd...

In this week’s episode deputy editor Becky Waterton chats with Tom Simpson, a New Zealander who missed the kind of savoury pies that were commonplace in his homeland so much that he set up his own bakery and set to work creating NZ pies, which can now be found in supermarkets all over Sweden.  So what's in his pies, and what advice he would give to anyone considering setting up their own busi...

In this week's episode we talk about a new map that shows just how successfully we immigrants are managing to take control of Sweden. We also put faces to the names of some of Sweden’s most popular brands. For Membership+ subscribers we uncork the results of a reader survey about the Swedish sense of humour. We also get into why it will no longer be possible to drop in for a visit to your local Mi...

Can our panelists pass the vocabulary section of högskoleprovet, the Swedish university entrance exam? Host Paul O’Mahony is joined this week by The Local's Richard Orange  and James Savage . Can you tell your lenses from your lentils? Have you heard the term på måfå ? And what's a show trial in Swedish?  READ ALSO: SWEDISH TEST: Can you pass the vocab part of Sweden's version of th...

In this week's episode we talk about how many people get divorced in Sweden and what the experience has been like for readers of The Local. We also look at international flights: why are there more flights than before out of Stockholm and why is it so expensive to fly from Gothenburg? Also, who are all those people in the photos in the arrivals hall at Arlanda Airport? For Membership+ subscri...

It's quiz time again in this week's episode of Sweden in Focus Extra for Membership+ subscribers. Can our panelists pass the vocabulary section of högskoleprovet, the Swedish university entrance exam? Host Paul O’Mahony is joined this week by The Local's Becky Waterton and James Savage . Get Membership+ to listen to all The Local's podcasts Sweden in Focus Extra is a podcast for The Local's Member...

In this week's episode we talk about why Sweden is paying Somalia to accept citizens deported from Sweden and whether the political scandal is helping or hurting the government. We also explain why a lot of Swedes will be eating goose blood soup to celebrate St Martin’s Day. For Membership+ subscribers we discuss why a growing number of Swedish towns are refusing to help the government with its pl...

This week's episode of Sweden in Focus Extra for Membership+ poses some seriously tricky Swedish language questions.  It’s time again to learn some Swedish as our panelists try their hand at the tricky vocabulary section of högskoleprovet, the Swedish university entrance exam.  Host Paul O’Mahony in Stockholm is joined this week by The Local's Becky Waterton  and James Savage . Get...

In this week's episode we talk about Sweden’s new men’s football manager Graham Potter and we ask how good his Swedish is. We dig into a survey of readers of The Local asking how people found their jobs in what has become a very difficult country to find work. For Membership+ subscribers we’ll look ahead to what to expect from next week’s autumn school break and the Halloween and All Saints holida...

When the hummus bar he founded really started to take off, Ibra Idrees employed his parents and brought them to Sweden But his mother and father now face deportation after the Migration Agency rejected his mother’s work permit. In his conversation with The Local’s Becky Waterton , Idrees explains how he developed Hummusson into one of Malmö best-loved haunts and how the establishment's family...

In this week's episode we talk about last weekend’s rowdy party leader debate and what it tells us about next year’s election. We also dig into some insights from readers of The Local on what prompted people to pack their bags and move to Sweden. For Membership+ subscribers, we discuss accusations that politicians are using xenophobic language to describe pro-Palestinian protestors. And finally we...

Sweden is one of the worst countries in Europe when it comes to providing job opportunities for educated foreigners, according to an investigation last year by Lighthouse Reports and media outlets including the Financial Times.  The study found for example that Sweden had the second-worst employment gap for college-educated migrants and that 68 percent of immigrants educated abroad were overq...

Sweden is one of the worst countries in Europe when it comes to providing job opportunities for educated foreigners, according to an investigation last year by Lighthouse Reports and media outlets including the Financial Times.  The study found for example that Sweden had the second-worst employment gap for college-educated migrants and that 68 percent of immigrants educated abroad were overq...