With climate change emerging as a top issue in national elections coming up Sept. 13, thousands of people converged on Stockholm just over a week ago for one of the biggest climate marches in recent memory.
Euronews counted the crowd in the Swedish capital at more than 10,000 people. Sveriges Radio, the climate broadcast platform We Don’t Have Time and others put the total at more than 50,000, five times the number organizers expected.
“This is huge. We are filling the streets of central Stockholm today,” said Lennart Dock a toxicologist and activist with the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, one of more than 280 organizations behind the march.
The uptick in protest came at a moment when Swedish climate policy “jeopardizes the country’s emissions-cutting goals, to reduce CO2 emissions from transport by 70% from 2010 levels by 2030 and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045,” Euronews writes.
#FridaysForFuture founder Greta Thunberg was one of the speakers at the march.
“There is absolutely no party in Sweden who are even proposing politics in line with anything close to what science says will take for us to avoid a climate disaster,” she told the crowd. “If we continue like now, we will see collapse; we are already seeing collapse.”
21-year-old student Kliff Lindberg said he was “relieved” to see such a strong turnout.
“We are so many people who are concerned about this problem,” he told Euronews. “That gives me a lot of strength, and it’s beautiful to see, I think.”
The event brought together “an unusually broad coalition of trade unions, churches, scientists, engineers, psychologists, environmental organizations, pensioners’ organizations, and many others,” We Don’t Have Time reports.
“People had travelled from across Sweden, and even from abroad,” with some of them riding their bikes from as far as away as Malmö, 600 kilometres to the north, the news story says. “The crowd was so big that by the time the front end of the march reached Gustav Adolfs torg, around three kilometres from the starting point, the tail end had not even begun moving from Vasaparken.”
Euronews says the government of Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, which took power in 2022, “has cut petrol taxes and reduced requirements for petrol suppliers to add low-carbon alternatives to their mix.” It has “notably rejected a commission’s recommendations on ways to meet the 2030 target, which included phasing out fossil fuels by hiking taxes on petrol and diesel.”
Euronews says Kristersson was trailing the centre-left opposition by 10 points in a recent public opinion poll, “making a change of government likely.” Some 37% of respondents identified climate change as their top vote-determining issue.
