Uppsala, Sweden

When I dropped off my kids at school early last week, I noticed that -another parent’s car was covered in ash — it had been parked in a garage where arsonists had been at work, attacking scores of vehicles. His Volvo had got away: just. ‘My car can be cleaned,’ the father told me, ‘but how can I explain this to my young kids?’

As Sweden goes to the polls next weekend, its politicians face another conundrum: how do they explain all this to the country?

I live in Uppsala, a leafy and prosperous university town north of Stockholm.