Reinfeldt in sunnier times POLITICS is slowly resuming after Sweden’s summer break. And Fredrik Reinfeldt, the prime minister, is celebrating a seasonal gift. The news of Barack Obama’s stopover in Stockholm en route to the G20 summit in St Petersburg in early September has created a media frenzy. This will be Sweden’s first-ever bilateral visit by an American president, and it may offer Mr Reinfeldt welcome distraction.With just a year to go until the next election, most polls show Mr Reinfeldt’s four-party centre-right coalition, which has been in power since 2006, trailing far behind the opposition. A July poll by Demoskop, a pollster, found only 37.1% backing the coalition, against 50.4% for the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party combined. Two of Mr Reinfeldt’s coalition allies, the Centre Party and the Christian Democrats, may not even get over the 4% parliamentary threshold.What has gone wrong? Compared with most of Europe, Sweden has done well. But unemployment is a running sore. It was a big reason for the Social Democrats’ defeat in 2006, when the rate stood at only 6% and Mr Reinfeldt promised to boost jobs…
