Swedish engagement with the climate has come in waves, but it tends to rise in election years. This past weekend, more than 50,000 people gathered in Stockholm for a climate demonstration. Among them was 88-year-old Åsa Sohlman, who said her commitment began with her grandchildren and the world they will grow up in. Her generation, she reflected, had done well financially on the back of oil, and now worried that much of that might go to waste.
Interest in the issue has fluctuated over the decades, says Magnus Wennerhag, professor of sociology at Södertörn University. It first drew attention in the late 1970s but did not begin mobilising people in Sweden until the early 1990s. After a few active years it faded, before returning in the 2000s around the Copenhagen climate summit.
Sohlman joined the Grand Panthers organisation twelve years ago, drawn in by a notice in the newspaper and by the group’s focus on future generations. Many older people feel the same, she suggested, wanting to act on behalf of grandchildren and great-grandchildren even knowing they may not see the worst of the crisis themselves.
The election in which climate arguably played its biggest role to date was in 1988, when the Green Party first entered parliament. In the 2022 parliamentary election, roughly one in five voters cited environmental and climate issues as a basis for their party choice, according to a report from the Electoral Research Program at the University of Gothenburg.
The single largest boost for the Swedish climate movement, researchers note, came with Greta Thunberg’s school strike, which began ahead of the 2018 election and rippled well beyond Sweden. Seen against that history, the weekend’s turnout fits a familiar rhythm, engagement building once more as another vote approaches.
