Poll: Trump uniquely unpopular in Sweden
Eighty per cent of Swedes dislike US president Donald Trump and only 10 percent like him, according to a new survey carried out by the Novus polling company and commissioned by Swedish Radio.
The survey, carried out in early March among a random sample of over 1,000 Swedes, asked respondents to place Trump on a scale from "strongly dislike" to "strongly like".
The outcome of the poll is uniquely negative, Sören Holmberg, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, suggested. He told Swedish Radio that previous polls measuring Swedes' attitudes to foreign leaders have not turned out such pessimistic results.
For instance, the SOM Institute, which is based at the University of Gothenburg, has previously measured Swedes' opinion of Italy's former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi and of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. While Putin got very negative ratings in the 2000s, judging from the new Novus poll, Swedes have even lower views of Trump.
However, there are also big differences within the Swedish population as regards views on the newly installed US president. Among green and left-wing voters, 96 per cent dislike him, while for Sweden Democrat voters the figure is only 36 per cent. A large number of Sweden Democrats (42 per cent) said they liked Trump.
Swedish Radio's political commentator, Fredrik Furtenbach, said both Trump and the Sweden Democrats have prioritised limiting immigration, especially from Muslim countries, and that that Sweden Democrat Party leadership's stance on Trump has changed since the US election campaign, where the choice between Clinton and Trump was presented as a choice between two evils.
Sweden Democrat leaders have praised Trump since his election as US president, for example for his attacks on Sweden's immigration and integration policies.
