The Swedish Presidency priority issues ended up being mostly about crisis management; economic crisis, climate change crisis and crisis in the EU’s institutional framework, Reinfeldt told the presidency website. After a total of 3 300 meetings, uncountable telephone calls and a number of trips later, Mr. Reinfeldt and his team successfully managed to resolve a number of the most pressing issues. The crises have been eliminated, he underlines. The EU’s financial market has been given a new financial supervisory architecture, the Union has a common mandate on the climate change issue, the Treaty of Lisbon has entered into force and the EU has agreed on two new leaders – a permanent President and a “foreign minister”.
Among the foreign policy achievements were the adoption of an Arctic policy document, the adoption of the Eastern Partnership, the Baltic Strategy and much more.
As BarentsObserver reported, even in the busy chairmanship period, the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt spent two days in the Norwegian and Russian High North. He there attended the Barents Euro-Arctic Council in Murmansk. Sweden in that meeting took over the chair of the council, a body which includes Russia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and the EU Commission, as well as several observer countries.
Spain on 1 January took over the EU chair.
