Sweden has not turned the page. The confidence in the royal family today is the lowest it has been since records began being kept, according to Swedish Television. While at the same time, the crown princess is more popular than ever.
“Victoria is getting the highest popularity value the SOM institute (an independent survey organization) has ever measured,” says Lennart Nilsson at Göteborg University. It was over a year ago that the book “Den motvillige monarken” (The Reluctant Monarch) was published. With that book, the confidence in the royal house dramatically decreased, and though the king asked to turn the page and move forward, not many seem to have followed his lead. According to the SOM Institute's annual survey the confidence in the royal family has fallen to record lows since then.

“Confidence in the royal family is the lowest it’s been since it began to be measured in 1995,” says Lennart Nilsson at the SOM Institute, according to SOM’s twitter feed Tuesday. According to SVT.se (Swedish Television’s website) more people still have confidence in the royal family than those who don’t, but the difference is now only four%, compared to 21% in 2010. While the survey shows that 56% want to keep the monarchy, 19% want to abolish it. Today, 20% think that the introduction of the republic would be a good idea. The corresponding number in 1976, a few years after the king lost his political power, was 9%.

Meanwhile, crown princess Victoria, new mom to heir Estelle, gets a maximum of digits as a public figure, the most a public person has ever received in a SOM survey. “Victoria is by far the most popular of all Scandinavian royalties,” says Nilsson. In the study, 9000 people aged 16-85 years were polled and 4720 people responded, giving a response rate of 57%.