LETTER FROM STOCKHOLM

For Sweden, as for Switzerland, it's a problem. Not the kind to provoke a diplomatic crisis, of course – but enough to set people's teeth on edge, especially when, at a press conference on the sidelines of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit, US President Joe Biden's tongue slips, and he says "Switzerland" instead of "Sweden." His predecessors Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush made the same blunder in their days as well.

To put an end to the confusion, Sweden has taken matters into its own hands with a video, posted online on October 24, appealing to the Swiss. "We're contacting you regarding our mutual problem," explains actress Emma Peters, with long blond hair and a white blazer, in front of two yellow and blue flags. "It's time we make the distinction between our two nations as clear as day by deciding who talks about what."

After all, it's not just US presidents who get mixed up. In 2018, to celebrate the IPO of Stockholm-based Spotify, Wall Street hoisted the white and red flag of... Switzerland! The following year, Grenoble's ice rink played the Swedish anthem before a Champions League hockey match between local club Les Brûleurs de Loups and SC Bern. For the record, the Swiss won, only to be eliminated in the next round by Sweden's Lulea.

At the beginning of the Visit Sweden campaign, the Swedish tourist board conducted a survey: "Last year, 120,000 internet users did a Google search to find out whether Sweden and Switzerland were the same country," revealed Susanne Andersson, the organization's CEO. What's more, according to two surveys carried out in the UK and the US, 43% of Britons and 50% of Americans admit to not being able to tell the two countries apart. Worse still: more than one in ten Britons think that ABBA and IKEA are Swiss. As for Americans, 10% admit to having almost booked a flight to the wrong destination.

The two countries are indeed similar: located in Europe, among the richest in the world, with a long history of neutrality (recently broken by Sweden's desire to join NATO). Blessed with breathtaking landscapes, both are also generally among the front runners in international rankings, be it for innovation or quality of life.

So how do you tell them apart? In the clip, already viewed nearly 250,000 times in less than a week, the Swedes propose a split: the banks go to Switzerland, the sandbanks to Sweden; the Swiss get yodeling, the Swedes get "silence and a lack of yodeling"; LSD, of course, belongs to Switzerland, where it was "invented" (in 1938, chemist Albert Hofmann discovered it somewhat by accident, then used it until a fairly advanced age), while Sweden has the aurora borealis, "a different kind of surreal experience."

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