Sweden’s government has announced to abolish the tax on airline ticketsThe fee will be abolished from July 1, 2025, as conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Tuesday. He justified the move with the need to strengthen the competitiveness of Swedish airlines. The abolition of the tax is “compatible with climate policy in the long term“ and continue to allow travel “in a very vast country,” he stressed.
The The tax was introduced in 2018 by the then ruling centre-left government. The height depends on the distance.
Economics Minister Ebba Busch stressed that only a minority of countries in the EU have an air transport tax. This includes Germany – here the tax was only increased by around 25 percent in May. The Federal Association of the German Aviation Industry had only criticized this at the beginning of August, saying that this was the main reason why passenger air traffic in Germany was not recovering from the Corona crisis as quickly as in other European countries.
In Sweden, Kristersson’s minority government replaced the Social Democrats in 2022; he is dependent on the ultra-right Sweden Democrats in parliamentn. The government had initially announced that it would halve the air transport tax – now it has been abolished completely.
Environmental organizations reacted with outrage. The government is thus “completely” abandoning its climate policy, Daniel Kihlberg of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation told the newspaper “Aftonbladet”. The Swedish Climate Change Council – an expert body that advises the government – had already complained in March that the government was jeopardizing the country’s climate goals with measures such as a lower fuel tax. (AFP)
