2009
Right bloc · MDeep recession, the Pirate Bay verdict, and Sweden's EU Presidency.
2009 infographic: recession, verdict, and EU Presidency
AI-generated infographic using the page's 2009 anchors.
Highlights
- Worst recession since WWII: Swedish GDP contracted by more than 5% in 2009, with unemployment rising from 6.2% to 8.3%. The Riksbank responded by cutting rates to historic lows and becoming the first central bank in the world to introduce a negative deposit rate (−0.25%).
- Pirate Bay trial verdict: On 17 April 2009, a Stockholm district court found all four Pirate Bay defendants guilty, sentencing them to one year in prison and a 30 million SEK (~€2.7 m) fine. The case was described as the most significant file-sharing verdict in European legal history, and prompted over 25,000 people to join the Swedish Pirate Party within days.
- Swedish EU Presidency: Sweden held the rotating Presidency of the EU Council from 1 July to 31 December 2009. Key achievements included overseeing the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty and adoption of the Stockholm Programme on justice and home affairs.
Events in this year
2009-02-05 The 2009 Alliance Energy Deal Lifts Sweden's Ban on New Nuclear Reactors On 5 February 2009 the four-party Alliance government agreed to lift the ban on building new nuclear reactors in Sweden. Two of the parties that signed it, the Centre Party and the Christian Democrats, had spent decades pushing to phase nuclear power out. Reform 2009-06-16 Peacetime Conscription Abolition 2009 On 16 June 2009 the Riksdag suspended mandatory military conscription in peacetime under the Reinfeldt government, replacing the Cold War mass-conscription model with a voluntary professional force and fixing the manning baseline that would later be partially reversed in 2017. Reform