Sweden has blocked an EU tobacco tax plan that critics warned would punish the smoke-free products behind the country’s sharp fall in smoking.
The move turns Sweden’s smoke-free success into a direct challenge to Brussels, coming just days after the European Parliament acknowledged it as the first EU country to hit the bloc’s five per cent smoking target.
Sweden’s finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson said she had kept her promise to protect snus users by refusing to back proposed EU-wide minimum taxes that would have sharply increased the excise on nicotine pouches.
The proposed revision of the Tobacco Excise Directive would have brought newer nicotine products, including pouches and vapes, under EU-wide minimum tax rules.
Supporters say the directive is needed to modernise tobacco taxation. Sweden says it risks undermining the very products that have helped drive smoking down.
At a meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels on Wednesday 3 June, a compromise deal put forward under the Cypriot presidency failed to win the unanimous support needed for EU tax changes. The directive has since been pulled from the agenda of finance ministers meeting in Luxembourg on 12 June.
For Sweden, this is more than a tax row. It is a fight over whether Europe will treat cigarettes and lower-risk nicotine products differently.
Sweden says Brussels must not punish switching
Stockholm had warned that the leaked form of the directive would have driven the excise on a kilogram of nicotine pouches from SEK 207 to almost SEK 1,600, a rise of close to 700 per cent.
That would have made one of Sweden’s most widely used cigarette alternatives far more expensive, narrowing the price gap between smoking and smoke-free nicotine products.
Svantesson made the government’s position clear after the proposal failed to advance.
“Now we are stopping the EU from raising the tax on snus,” she said in a post on X. “I promised Swedish snus users that we would not let Brussels shock-raise the tax on white snus, and I am keeping that promise. I will always put the interests of Swedes first. Other countries do not get to decide over our snus.”
The intervention is important because Sweden’s public health record has become increasingly difficult for Brussels to ignore.
While most of Europe is still far from the EU’s target of cutting tobacco use below five per cent by 2040, Sweden has already reached that milestone.
The Swedish model
Sweden’s success has been built on a very different approach to nicotine from much of the EU. Snus, a pasteurised oral tobacco product, has been used in Sweden for decades. It remains banned for sale across the rest of the EU, but Sweden secured an exemption when it joined the bloc.
In more recent years, nicotine pouches and vapes have added to the range of smoke-free options available to adult smokers.
The result is a nicotine market in which many people still use nicotine, but far fewer smoke cigarettes.
Daily smoking in Sweden has fallen to 5.3 per cent, the lowest rate in Europe and far below the EU average. Smoking is down 54 per cent since 2012, according to figures cited by Smoke Free Sweden.
Male lung cancer mortality is 61 per cent below the EU average, while tobacco-related disease is significantly lower than elsewhere on the continent.
That is the context Brussels risks missing if it treats all nicotine products as though they carry the same risk.
For harm reduction advocates, Sweden’s lesson is that when adults who smoke can access appealing, affordable and socially accepted alternatives, cigarette use falls.
Experts hail Sweden’s stand
Dr Delon Human, leader of Smoke Free Sweden and a former secretary-general of the World Medical Association, said Sweden was right to resist the EU’s approach.
“Sweden has stuck to its guns, and it is right to,” he said. “This is a country that has all but eliminated smoking by making safer alternatives affordable, available and acceptable. Severely increasing taxes on those products would have punished the very people who did the responsible thing and switched. Sweden understands the value of harm reduction because it has lived the results.”
He added that public support in Sweden for harm reduction is strong.
“Public support runs deep, with a 2025 Swedish survey finding that 74 per cent of respondents believe that global adoption of a strategy to help smokers to switch to smoke-free alternatives can drastically improve public health,” Dr Human said.
Brussels has not dropped the file
The directive has not disappeared. With agreement out of reach under the Cypriot presidency, the issue is expected to move to Dublin when Ireland takes over the rotating Council presidency on 1 July.
Ireland has already signalled that tobacco taxation will remain a priority. Its government has said prices should reflect the harm tobacco causes. Harm reduction advocates will be watching closely to see whether that approach properly distinguishes between cigarettes and smoke-free nicotine products.
Dr Human said the pause gives the EU a chance to rethink. “This is a reprieve, and a chance for the EU to get the next version right,” he said. “Whoever holds the pen, the principle has to be risk-proportionate taxation. Make cigarettes carry the heaviest burden, let safer alternatives compete on price, and smoking rates come down.
“Tax the alternatives into the ground and Europe simply shields the cigarette trade from competition. Sweden has shown which path saves lives, and the least Brussels can do is stop trying to tax that success out of existence.”
