Sweden blocks EU tobacco tax directive to protect its smoke-free success

International health experts today hailed Sweden’s success in blocking new EU-wide taxes that would have increased the excise on nicotine pouches by up to 700%.

Sweden’s Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson announced she had kept her promise to protect snus users by blocking the EU’s proposed tobacco tax directive, which was threatening the very products that have driven Sweden to smoke-free status.

Sweden refused to accept the proposed minimum tax rates on nicotine pouches and, at a meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels on Wednesday (3 June), a compromise deal put forward by the Cypriot presidency failed to win the backing it needed. The directive has since been pulled from the agenda of finance ministers meeting in Luxembourg on June 12.

The victory came just three days after the European Parliament declared that Sweden is the first EU nation to achieve official smoke-free status, with smoking prevalence below 5%.

Stockholm has long warned that the directive, in its leaked form, would have pushed the excise on a kilogram of nicotine pouches from SEK 207 to almost SEK 1,600, a rise of close to 700%, with much of that money flowing to Brussels rather than staying in Sweden.

Finance Minister Svantesson made the government’s position plain. “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.”

Dr Delon Human, leader of Smoke Free Sweden and a former secretary-general of the World Medical Association, welcomed the move and said Sweden was defending a model the rest of the continent should be copying. 

“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.”

Those results are hard to argue with. Daily smoking in Sweden has fallen to 5.3%, the lowest rate in Europe and a fraction of the EU average, and down by 54% since 2012. Male lung cancer mortality now sits 61% below the EU average, and tobacco-related disease across the board is far rarer than elsewhere on the continent. 

Snus, nicotine pouches and vapes have done the heavy lifting, and Swedish public health policy has backed smokers who want to switch rather than blocking their way. 

“Public support runs deep, with a 2025 Swedish survey finding that 74% 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 added. 

The directive has not gone away. With consensus out of reach under the Cypriot presidency, the can has been kicked down the road to Dublin, which takes over the rotating Council presidency on 1 July and has already flagged the file as a priority. The Irish government has signalled that it wants prices to reflect the harm tobacco causes, an approach that risks sweeping safer products into the same net as the cigarettes they replace.

“This is a reprieve, and a chance for the EU to get the next version right,” said Dr Human. “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.”