Gibburt

Most European countries give their permanent residents a social security number. In Sweden, however, this so called “personal number” takes on a special significance. It’s the ultimate means of identification. All government offices, banks, shops etc. use it to look up and verify your details in the national database. This also means that the only physical forms of identification universally accepted in Sweden are those with your “personal number” on it. That is, either a Swedish driver’s license or a Swedish ID card issued by the post or your bank. I can’t stress enough how important in everyday life it is to have one of these. You need it to open a bank account, to get health care, to collect parcels, borrow videos… in other words, it’s really a “life entitlement card”.

When I first moved to Sweden back in 2000, I was quite appalled at how horrendously difficult it was to get such an ID card. I needed to get a special certificate from the tax office and another person who already had Swedish identification had to vouch for me. And obviously my bank didn’t tell me about all these requirements from the start, so it took many failed attempts and several weeks before my application was finally approved.

Now I’ve been in the UK for the past four years and my old ID card has expired in the meantime. So when I moved back to Sweden a week ago, getting a new one was, of course, on the top of my to-do list. I already knew how to do it, so it shouldn’t have been too difficult this time around, right? Wrong. I hadn’t anticipated the inanity of Sweden’s new conservative government.

You see, since the beginning of this year, there’s a new national ID card issued by the police which is also accepted as a travel document by many other countries. Of course, it’s only available for Swedish citizens. And because all Swedes can now get their new national ID card from the police, the banks and the post have completely stopped issuing the old-style ID cards. Which kind of brings up the question of what foreign citizens are supposed to do now.

“Aah, hmm, yeees, that can be a little difficuult, yes,” the clerk at my bank tells me. For those not familiar with the gentleness of colloquial Swedish, this basically translates to: “Yeah man, you’re like totally fucked.” Apparently, the Swedish police might get permission from next year onwards to issue ID cards to foreigners, too, but until then, people like me will have a lot of fun as a result of this little oversight in the law.

Filed under: Politics, WtF by Ralf Damaschke | Social tagging: bureaucracy > Sweden