The Culture Budget is Described as a "Scandal"

She predicts "major problems" for public libraries, regional museums, regional theaters, and opera houses, and sees a risk of "massive layoffs".

With this economy, municipalities and regions will hardly have good conditions and that also means they won't, in competition with other policy areas, prioritize culture.

"Remarkable"

Sara Edström, national chairman of KRO, sees no investment at all in the visual and design area, whose practitioners have "incomes at the bottom of the scale". She calls the cutbacks in regional culture "remarkable".

They are investigating the cultural cooperation model, hopefully with the ambition to strengthen it, but then the budget doesn't follow at all. There are major cutbacks and regions have already announced before this that many activities must be closed.

The cultural budget is in a kind of continued stagnation, according to Mats Berglund (MP), chairman of the Riksdag's cultural committee, who is calling for more political initiatives:

What I react to is primarily that the activities where we really need to allocate money, for example the free cultural life, get nothing. A film initiative had been needed, Sweden has the lowest film support in Europe.

"The entire ecosystem"

At the same time, the government's reduction of study associations continues, where another 100 million kronor disappear, he highlights.

It affects not only study associations but the entire ecosystem of culture on site, that the premises must be terminated, that music houses disappear and so on.

Simon Norrthon, chairman of Scen & Film, talks about a continued "weakening of the cultural sector".

A weak budget with continued cutbacks, no increases, no price and wage adjustments, but a continued weakening of the stage and film area, says Simon Norrthon.

He welcomes the investment in Creative School but would rather have seen the money go directly to professional culture.