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Adolf Fredrik, Gustav III’s father, was described by one English contemporary as having ‘the title of king, with hardly the privileges of a subject’. Unlike his British counterpart George II, he had no power to summon or dissolve his parliament.

Gustav was an unimpressive figure physically, weedy and foppish, and slightly lame since birth, but when he addressed the members of the Riksdag he made them flinch with his phrases of masterful contempt

The new constitution that Gustav now promulgated, in place of that of 1720-72, brought Sweden more into line with contemporary Britain.

The main difference between the British and Swedish systems was that, whereas in Britain the monarch’s executive power was in practice delegated to ministers more industrious, more  proficient and, for the most part,  more intellectually gifted than their royal master, in Sweden it was Gustav III himself who was indisputably in day to day charge

No other of the Enlightened Despots was more fond than Gustav of the time-wasting rituals of court life, the levées, formal audiences and ceremonial entries and exits.

Whereas Napoleon, in his coup d’etat of 19e Brumaire 1799 broke down and began mumbling in front of the popular assembly he was trying to overawe, Gustav III easily faced down his opponents in the Riksdag

Gustav III may well have held a record among monarchs prior to the nineteenth century for the number of other crowned heads he met. What Louis XV and Louis XVI of France or Ferdinand IV of Naples thought of him is uncertain, though none of these Bourbons were exactly noted for their insight into character. Pope Pius VI pretended to be delighted with Gustav (the first Protestant monarch ever to meet a pope) and made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. The other Enlightened Despots, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, agreed in thinking Gustav charming in a wearying sort of way, and faintly ridiculous. Leopold II, Joseph II’s brother and successor, perhaps the ablest politician among the Enlightened Despots – he was still only Grand Duke of Tuscany when Gustav met him

the Swedish king was a positive menace with his incessant scheming and readiness to interfere in other governments’ affairs

all radical improvements in national character take place during the severest wars’. Russia, having annexed the Crimea, had embarked on a titanic struggle with the Ottoman Empire which was absorbing stupendous quantities of manpower and treasure. At the beginning of 1788 he began making plans to attack Russia from the rear.

Gustav found himself far from his capital, stuck with an army that would not obey him. He was rescued  by the Danish government declaring war on him. Hurrying back to Sweden, Gustav rode to Gothenburg, 250 miles cross country in forty-eight hours – the last sixty miles quite alone and on borrowed farm horses, in blinding hailstorms – to rally the defences of the city against the invading Danes

The senior Swedish officers rejected all the courses of action proposed by Gustav and his latest discovery, William Sidney Smith, a British naval captain who had turned up without the permission of his own government; they even, according to Smith, talked of ‘proposing terms of Capitulation independent of the King’.

Catherine, still preoccupied with the war with Turkey, was glad to patch up a compromise peace

While the Stockholm crowds stood outside cheering him, Gustav confronted the chamber of nobles with a new constitution, and when they howled it down he coolly ordered the secretary of the chamber to record their vote as yes: a piece of blatant illegality combined with intimidation that anticipates the tactics of twentieth-century dictators. In fact, apart from giving the King the power to make war without the Riksdag’s consent, the new constitution marked little advance on that of 1772

Eleven weeks after Gustav rammed his new constitution down the throats of the nobles, the Estates General met at Versailles and by the time of the peace settlement with Russia the French ancien régime was well on the way to dissolution.

I cannot allow that it is right to support rebels against their Lawful King

Despite the fact that Sweden was virtually bankrupt in the aftermath of the Russian war he now offered to land 16,000 Swedish and 8,000 Russian troops at Ostend, in Austrian territory, and to march on Paris to overthrow the Constituent Assembly, with the support of an Austrian army advancing from the Rhine. In June 1791 he went to Aachen and was greeted there as a saviour by the French royalist exiles. While he was there Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette made their bid to escape from Paris

Marie Antoinette’s brother Leopold, who had succeeded Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria the year before, was enraged by Gustav’s interference: there were some too, including Gustav’s uncle Henry of Prussia, who believed that his schemes for an armed intervention in France were merely a cover for a secret plan to seize Norway from the Danes

On March 1st, 1792, Leopold died – poisoned, it is said, by an aphrodisiac of his own concoction – but Gustav was destined never to learn that there was no longer any challenge to his self-appointed role as leader of the monarchist opposition to the French Revolution

Gustav III was only forty-six when he died. That was at least eight years older than the most brilliant of his predecessors on the Swedish throne, Gustav II Adolf, Karl X and Karl XII – and if he had lived a normal span he would still have been king at the time of Waterloo.

The economic weakness of his country, the inveterate opposition of the social class that elsewhere might have been a king’s chief support, and the increasing influence of the revolutionary ferment in France may have meant that, even if he had lived, he would not have been able to go as far as he dreamed: he is one of the great might-have-beens of history.

he enlisted in the French army

supporter of the Revolution

Bernadotte first met Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797 in Italy. Their relationship, at first friendly, was soon embittered by rivalries and misunderstandings

In November 1799 Bernadotte refused to assist Bonaparte’s coup d’état that ended the Directory but neither did he defend it

When, on May 18, 1804, Napoleon proclaimed the empire, Bernadotte declared full loyalty to him and, in May, was named marshal of the empire

he was invited to become crown prince of Sweden. In 1809 a palace revolution had overthrown King Gustav IV of Sweden and had put the aged, childless, and sickly Charles XIII on the throne. The Danish prince Christian August had been elected crown prince but died suddenly in 1810, and the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice.

he respected his military ability, his skillful and humane administration of Hanover and the Hanseatic towns, and his charitable treatment of Swedish prisoners in Germany

Bernadotte was elected Swedish crown prince. On October 20 he accepted Lutheranism and landed in Sweden; he was adopted as son by Charles XIII and took the name of Charles John (Karl Johan). The Crown Prince at once assumed control of the government and acted officially as regent during the illnesses of Charles XIII. Napoleon now tried to prevent any reorientation of Swedish foreign policy and moreover sent an immediate demand that Sweden declare war on Great Britain

Charles John was anxious to achieve something for Sweden that would prove his worth to the Swedes and establish his dynasty in power. He could, as many Swedes wished, have regained Finland from Russia, either by conquest or by negotiation

the conquest of Norway from Denmark, based on a Swedish alliance with Napoleon’s enemies. An alliance was signed with Russia in April 1812, with Great Britain in March 1813—with the British granting a subsidy for the proposed conquest of Norway—and with Prussia in April 1813. Urged by the allies, however, Charles John agreed to take part in the great campaign against Napoleon and to postpone his war with Denmark. The Crown Prince landed his troops at Stralsund, Ger., in May 1813 and soon took command of the allied army of the north

conserve his forces for the war with Denmark, and the Prussians bore the brunt of the fighting

After the decisive Battle of Leipzig (October 1813), Napoleon’s first great defeat, Charles John succeeded in defeating the Danes in a swift campaign and forced King Frederick VI of Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel (January 1814), which transferred Norway to the Swedish crown. Charles John now had dreams of becoming king or “protector” of France, but he had become alienated from the French people, and the victorious allies would not tolerate another soldier in charge of French affairs

Charles John conducted an efficient and almost bloodless campaign, and in August the Norwegians signed the Convention of Moss, whereby they accepted Charles XIII as king

At the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), Austria and the French Bourbons were hostile to the upstart prince, and the son of the deposed Gustav was a potential pretender to the throne. But, thanks to Russian and British support, the status of the new dynasty was undisturbed

Upon the death of Charles XIII on Feb. 5, 1818, Charles John became king of Sweden and Norway, and the former republican and revolutionary general became a conservative ruler.

His foreign policy inaugurated a long and favourable period of peace, based on good relations with Russia and Great Britain

By the time this program had been brought to success and Stanisław Leszczyński elected king of Poland—Augustus being forced to accept the settlement by a Swedish invasion of Saxony in September 1706—Charles XII had matured both as a general and as a statesman.

Most significant of these personal decisions was that to fight Augustus II in Poland and to transform Poland from a divided country, where Augustus had both partisans and opponents, into an ally and a base for the final campaign against Russia.

After negotiations for Charles’s marriage to a Danish cousin, the daughter of Christian V, were begun on Denmark’s initiative, Charles’s advisers held back until the outcome of Danish negotiations with other powers was known. These negotiations led in fact to a coalition between Denmark, Saxony, and Russia that, by attacking Sweden in the spring of 1700, began the Great Northern War. The speedy success hoped for by the three allied powers did not materialize, and rumours of rebellion by the Swedish nobility against the absolutist monarchy, in case of war, proved false.

His first necessity in 1706, however, was to secure Sweden’s position in relation to Russia, which, under Peter I the Great, had from 1703 onward made good use of Charles XII’s campaigns in Poland to train its army and undertake a piecemeal conquest of the Swedish east Baltic provinces.

He became the object of Turkish intrigues and in February 1713 had to fight a regular battle, the kalabalik of Bender (modern Bendery, Moldova), to avoid a plot to deliver him into the hands of Augustus of Saxony, now restored in Poland. The closing of the Turko-Habsburg frontier due to the plague, and the determination of the anti-French alliance in the War of the Spanish Succession to prevent Sweden from using its bases in Germany to attack its enemies further circumscribed Charles XII’s freedom of action in these years. The Swedish council, virtually in charge of affairs at home during his absence, was preoccupied with threats to Sweden from Denmark.

Charles XII was not the simple and uneducated soldier-king he has often been made out to be. His intellectual pursuits were many and varied. He became increasingly occupied with new ideas in administration, and many of his administrative reforms were far ahead of their time. He demanded considerable sacrifices of those classes in Sweden who were lukewarm about the war effort once the years of bad fortune set in after 1709.

It could have been mapping or training, it could of course have been spying. Or is it even possible that it set out to be noticed - just to send a message? Here I am. Catch me if you can.

a coded message in Russian, allegedly intercepted by Swedish intelligence, sent from the archipelago to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea.

f so it would appear to be part of a pattern of Russia trying to probe the defences of some of its near neighbours - both countries like Sweden which aren't in Nato, and countries like Estonia which are. Last month Sweden protested to Moscow after two Russian fighter jets entered its airspace. And across the Baltic in Estonia, an intelligence official working close to the border was abducted by Russian agents and taken to Moscow.

The plot thickens.

Not only had Charles placed Sweden in a calamitous situation internationally but he had left behind him a legacy of domestic troubles. His usurpation of the throne had meant not only the expulsion of a Roman Catholic sovereign whose rule seemed to threaten Sweden’s Lutheranism but also the defeat of the aristocratic constitutionalism of the Council of State, and it had been followed by the execution of five leading members of the high aristocracy.

Charles IX had intervened in Russia to prevent the Poles from placing their own candidate on the Russian throne;

The king observed the spirit of the charter. The aristocracy found in Gustav a king favourable to their interests. He enlisted the nobility in the service of the state and thus provided them with numerous economic benefits.

The first decade of the reign, therefore, saw the creation of the Supreme Court (1614) and the establishment of the Treasury and the Chancery as permanent administrative boards (1618), and by the end of the reign an Admiralty and a War Office had been created—each presided over by one of the great officers of state.

And in the 1620s a thorough reform professionalized local government and placed it securely under the control of the crown. The Council of State became, for the first time, a permanent organ of government able to assume charge of affairs while the king was fighting overseas.

Thus, the fate of Europe was bound up with what happened in Livonia or Prussia. Protestant Europe was slow to appreciate the connection, but as the Protestant cause plunged to disaster in Germany, its leaders increasingly turned their eyes to Gustav as a possible saviour.

The disastrous defeat (1626) of Christian IV of Denmark, who had intervened in Germany without such an assurance, justified his caution, but it also made Swedish intervention inevitable.

Gustav landed in Germany without allies. Whatever the feelings of the Protestant populations, the Protestant princes resented Swedish interference, and the refusal of George William of Brandenburg to cooperate with the Swedes thwarted Gustav’s attempts to save Magdeburg from capture and sack at the hands of Tilly’s armies. In September John George of Saxony, provoked by violations of his neutrality, formally allied himself with Sweden.

the old security had become the new indemnity. Many Germans feared, and some Swedish diplomats now believed, that a final settlement must probably entail the deposition of the German emperor Ferdinand II and the election of Gustav as emperor in his place. It was a solution he must certainly have contemplated, but there is no firm evidence of his attitude; probably he considered it only as a last resort. Certainly it would have alienated those German allies who had no wish to exchange a Habsburg domination for a Swedish one.

His death came at a moment when it had already begun to appear that the victory he believed to be essential to the stability of Germany and the security of Sweden might be more difficult to achieve than he had imagined. But he had lived long enough to deflect the course of German history. His intervention in the Thirty Years’ War, at a moment when the armies of the Habsburg emperor and the German princes of the Catholic League controlled almost the whole of Germany, ensured the survival of German Protestantism against the onslaughts of the Counter-Reformation.

By supporting the German princes against the emperor, Gustav Adolf defeated the attempts of the Habsburgs to make their imperial authority a reality and thus played a part in delaying the emergence of a united Germany until the 19th century.

When Frederick of Hessen died in 1751, he was succeeded by Adolf Frederick, who ruled until his death in 1771. While visiting Paris, Gustav III (ruled 1771–92) acceded to the throne.

But Gustav’s politics were unstable. Until 1786 he put into effect social reforms that belonged to enlightened despotism, thus enmeshing himself in its traditional dilemma: alienating the “haves” without satisfying the “have nots.”

After Turkey attacked Russia in 1787, Gustav went to war against Russia in 1788 to recapture the Finnish provinces. The Swedish attack failed, partly because of a conspiracy by noble Swedish officers—the Anjala League—who, during the war, sent a letter to Catherine II (the Great) of Russia, proposing negotiations.

In 1731 the Swedish East India Company was founded, which was extremely successful until it was forced out of business during the Napoleonic Wars.

he defended the decision not to implement the tighter restrictions seen in Denmark, France and the UK. “We all, as individuals, have to take responsibility. We can’t legislate and ban everything,” he said. “It is also a question of commonsense behaviour.

The best explanation for why Sweden is such an outlier centres on the unusual level of independence given to government agencies such as Tegnell’s, and the reluctance of politicians to override them.

His team at the Public Health Agency of Sweden is critical of the Imperial College paper that warned this month that 250,000 people in the UK would die if the government failed to introduce more draconian measures.

“We have had a fair amount of people looking at it and they are sceptical,” says Tegnell. “They think Imperial chose a number of variables that gave a prognosis that was quite pessimistic, and that you could just as easily have chosen other variables that gave you another outcome. It’s not a peer-reviewed paper. It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”

“As long as the Swedish epidemic development stays at this level,” he tells the Observer, “I don’t see any big reason to take measures that you can only keep up for a very limited amount of time.”

“They’re listening to the health department; they’re listening to the experts they have on hand.”

More than 2,000 Swedish university researchers published a joint letter on Wednesday questioning the Public Health Agency’s position, while the previous week saw leading epidemiologists attack the agency in emails leaked to Swedish television.

“How many lives are they willing to sacrifice so as not to lockdown and risk greater effects on the economy?”

Tegnell argues that because in Sweden there are almost no stay-at-home parents, closing schools would have knocked out at least a quarter of doctors and nurses, crippling the health service

Tegnell even questions whether stopping the progress of the virus is desirable. “We are just trying to slow it, because this disease will never go away. If you manage, like South Korea, to get rid of it, even they say that they count on it coming back

While Tegnell understands that he will be blamed if Sweden ends up in a similar situation to that of Italy, he refuses to be panicked. “I wouldn’t be too surprised if it ended up about the same way for all of us, irrespective of what we’re doing,” he says. “I’m not so sure that what we’re doing is affecting the spread very much. But we will see.”

The U.N. working group is believed to have decided that Assange is being unlawfully detained, according to the Press Association, a British news organization. The decision is scheduled to be published Friday.

The Swedish prosecutors' statement noted a May 2015 court ruling that Assange "should still be detained" and that Ecuadorian officials haven't allowed Swedish authorities to interview him.

The Swedes issued an arrest warrant for Assange on sex crime allegations unrelated to WikiLeaks in 2010. Assange was in London at the time, and as he fought to have the warrant dismissed, Ecuador granted him political asylum. He's been living in the embassy since June 2012.

Whatever the U.N. group decides, it won't affect how Swedish authorities look at Assange's case. Nor will it necessarily affect what police in London will do.

London police ended their 24-hour guard of the Ecuadorian Embassy in October, saying it was no longer "proportionate."

Assange said he submitted a complaint to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention about his case in 2014. Justice For Assange, a site set up to fight for his release, said the panel is expected to rule this week on whether Assange's detention arbitrarily deprived him of his liberty -- in other words, whether it is illegal.

But Assange added that if the panel ruled in his favor, "I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me."The Australian has not been charged and has denied the rape claim. He says it is retaliation for WikiLeaks having released thousands of pages of government secrets.He has said he fears Sweden would extradite him to the United States, where he could face the death penalty if he is charged and convicted of publishing those documents.

In his appeal to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange said his confinement has deprived him of access to fresh air, sunlight and adequate medical care. He says he is subject to round-the-clock surveillance and remains in a constant state of insecurity.

In other instances of detention, the U.N. working group called for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar after years of house arrest. The group has also ruled for the release of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy, but he remains in prison.

Sweden now has more would-be jihadists per capita going to fight for extremist groups than any European country other than Belgium, according to a 2015 study by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence.

Recruiters for the Islamic State and for Al Qaeda affiliates active in Syria and other groups, including the Shabab, target the second generation of immigrants, terrorism experts said.

Mr. Gui is not the first Hong Kong-based publisher of sensitive political books to be arrested by the mainland police on unrelated charges. In 2014, Yiu Mantin, who had been planning to publish a book critical of President Xi Jinping, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling industrial chemicals.

A press officer for the Swedish Foreign Ministry did not immediately return a phone call and email sent outside of normal office hours.

The knights of the suburbs do not insist that the hundreds of thousands who will be thrown on the dole in the coming months need Swedish levels of unemployment benefit and an interventionist Scandinavian state to retrain them.

Covid-19 is exposing the lack of social solidarity in Britain.

You have to be over 40 to understand the peculiar evil of mass unemployment

I was one of the unemployed of the Thatcher years and learned that behind the jargon about “social capital” and “scarring” is a concept that is easier to grasp: your confidence is shot to pieces. The longer you are out of work, the more insecure you become and the harder it becomes for you to convince anyone to employ you

Benefits are a commitment to social solidarity because they are not just protections against hunger, homelessness and want, but because they reflect a society’s willingness to work with you as you struggle to hold yourself together.

Sweden is “the best place in the world to lose your job” because employers pay a levy to job security councils whose coaches seek you out and match your skills and ambitions with the market.

The fantasy land of Sweden where sickness never comes is a fairytale. By not locking down in the spring, Sweden had a more protracted outbreak with far more deaths per capita than its neighbours

Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.

“They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”

Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.

this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.

The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.

The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.

While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.

they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”

She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)

The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union

Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”

“The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.

“By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”

The anger of young immigrants has bewildered and alarmed elders in their communities. After the riot police were pulled off the streets late last week, older immigrants mounted their own effort to defuse tensions. “There is no excuse for this violence,”

“Sweden has given me opportunities I didn’t have in Iraq,” but “I’m not treated the same as a white guy.” “I feel discrimination all the time,”

The recent violence has been a boon to the Swedish Democrats, the anti-immigration party. Opinion polls suggest the party is gaining in popularity, partly because of the indignation many Swedes feel about being called racists after accepting so many refugees.

“The police are frightened, and young people are frightened,” he said. “When frightened people meet, you only get trouble.”

Statistics show that Muslims in Sweden are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than perpetrators. Crime against Muslims in the country jumped by nearly 90% between 2012 and 2015, the government said.

The question is how long this situation can last. It might be that the current stalemate is just a transitional phase, a necessary step on the path from one order to another, and that at some point a group of politicians will figure out how to channel populist energy into a program or coalition that can make Western countries governable again.

all this speculation assumes that the stalemate will end relatively quickly, that with a discredited establishment harassed by not-quite-ready populisms, something has to give. No iron law of history requires that to happen

there are plenty of historical precedents for a situation in which a system stalemates or stagnates for generations, where revolts and reform programs founder again and again, where a disliked or despised elite holds on to power for a long time against divided and chaotic forms of populism.

a possible Western future in which the presently besieged establishment, “with its near-monopoly of wealth, political power, expertise and media influence, completely and successfully represses the numerically greater but politically weaker working-class majority. If that is the case, the future North America and Europe may look a lot like Brazil and Mexico, with nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few fashionable metropolitan areas but surrounded by a derelict, depopulated, and despised ‘hinterland.’”

the Swedish army had ceased to exist. Charles managed to flee southward to the Ottoman Empire, where he spent five years in exile. Poltava was a major turning point. Russia could now dominate the Polish and Baltic lands without any Swedish opposition, and Peter became the leading ruler in the region

Polls also suggest almost half of Stockholmers are remote working.

There are more guidelines than strict rules, with a focus on staying home if you're sick or elderly, washing your hands, and avoiding any non-essential travel, as well as working from home.

Demography may also be a relevant factor in the country's approach. In contrast to the multi-generational homes in Mediterranean countries, more than half of Swedish households are made up of one person, which cuts the risk of the virus spreading within families.

"My wife is also having her own company, so we pretty much depend on ourselves. Business is bad. I still have bills to pay. We're gonna have to call the banks," says owner Al Mocika.

Dr Emma Frans says history will be the judge of which politicians and scientists around Europe have made the best calls so far.

"Nobody really knows what measurements will be the most effective," she says. "I'm quite glad that I'm not the one making these decisions".