dilluns, 20 de setembre del 2010

Sverigedemocraterna


Yesterday took place the national Swedish elections, and Fredrik Reinfeldt (the head of the center-right coalition) won the elections.

First of all we have to congratulate the coalition for winning the elections again, after they won it in 2006 and they finished with the hegemony of the Social Democrats. We have to remind that the Conservatives won the elections because they promised “social policies”, which are more common between the lines of the Swedish Social Democrats, and we have to say that the Conservatives has passed the exam with a good mark.

However this time the Conservatives have not won with majority and sure that they will have to make some political pacts. We have to speak about the phenomenon of The Sweden Democrats, who has got around 20 seats in the Swedish Parliament. After the results one of the firsts words of the main political parties (the center-right coalition and The Social Democrats) were that they had not got any intention to pact with the racist party (Sweden Democrats), so it has opened a lot of ways of pacts (perhaps a pact between the Conservatives and the Green Party).

Anyway, what we have to analyze is the rising of the called “racist team”; I think that the other politicians cannot ignore the will of thousands of persons; I mean that if this team has got this results we have to look for why, 20 seats is not a chance. One of the causes of this result is the economic crises, which has hit the Swedish society despite the efforts of the government to avoid it. During this last decade a lot of immigrants have arrived in Europe and in Sweden too, and when the crises arrived, problems like unemployment appeared, and it hit the government because the taxes that it collected decreased, with the consequence that the public services became worse, and this is one of the main concerns of the Swedish people.

Immigration is a phenomenon that if you have, you have to accept it, and you have to try to integrate these people in the society, and at the same time the immigrants has the duty to make efforts to integrate in the new place that they have arrived.

In conclusion, the rising of parties like Sweden Democrats is not uncommon in Europe, and to avoid it we have to implant policies to regulate immigration, but never with the aim to discriminate. We have to control the immigration, although it seems quite difficult in a country where the 20% of the population are immigrants, and this is the case of Sweden, where can appear some racist parties if you don’t implant any serious policy to control de immigration.

dimecres, 1 de setembre del 2010

Where the ocean meets my hand


Since the day that I left that place, I have wished every day to return there, and after a year I have got my desire.

It was a Saturday afternoon and from the Flygbussarna (the bus that takes you in the airport and brings you to the city) we could see Stockholm, nice as always but cloudy and ready to rain. During the days before going to Sweden, I have to recognize that one of my main concerns was the weather, because it is said that august is the wettest month in Sweden. Despite the weather of Saturday, we were luckily and we had nice weather the rest of the days.

Is not the same Stockholm in winter than in august, and the majority of time that I lived in Sweden it was very cold and snowed. In summer people walk and sit on the streets. The Swedish people and some tourists too, are in the terraces of bars drinking some beer or soda.

Once our bus stopped in Cityterminalen we headed to our hostel, which was in Gamla Stan, the old city. We walked until Sergels Torg and after we walked through Drottninggatan, one of the most commercial streets of Stockholm that join Norrmalm with Gamla Stan. Our hostel was in Skeppsbron 22, and once we had arrived in Gamla Stan we walked around the Royal Castel to get to our street.

After several minutes we arrived in Skeppsbron (in Swedish, the ship’s bridge). In front of me I had the Best Hostel Skeppsbron and in my back I had the Baltic Sea, so I turned where the ocean meets the land and where the ocean meets my hand, where I could feel the Swedish’s winds blowing again.