‘Growth will be hit’: Swedish PM issues warning over impact of Trump’s tariffs​on April 3, 2025 at 2:57 pm

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said at a press conference on Thursday afternoon that the 20 percent tariff Trump had announced on imports from the EU had been “bad but not unexpected”.  

“Yesterday’s announcement is probably more damaging than many people had expected,” he said, but he stressed that it was not beyond Sweden’s capability to manage. 

“This has happened before in history and it will happen again,” he said, adding Sweden would fight for free trade every day, both internationally and through the EU. 

“Our goal is not more barriers to trade, not trade wars, but instead to solve this through negotiations.” 

Sweden would push, he said, for better cooperation with other countries, presenting as an example a possible free trade deal between India and the EU. 

Sweden’s finance minister, Elisabeth Svantesson, meanwhile, said that Sweden’s economy was in a strong position to handle the economic impact of the tariffs, calling it urstark, a Swedish word meaning “extremely strong”.

Her department, she said, estimated that the tariffs announced on Wednesday would reduce growth in 2025 by between 0.15 and 0.4 percent.

“In the long term, there will be other effects. We are, for example, going to develop new trading patterns and no longer trade in the same way if the tariffs remain in the longer term,” she explained. “But growth is going to be reduced and that is why we are saying that this is bad.”  

In a speech delivered earlier in the day at an event hosted in Stockholm on EU capital markets, Kristersson put a positive spin on the position Europe found itself in.

“Europe is certainly not perfect, but we do have agency over our own future,” he said. “If the EU manages to reform while others are either banned from global trade or choose to isolate themselves, then Europe will be a winner. The world needs and deserves a European renaissance. Sweden will do its part.”