Left Party leader uses carrot stunt in debate to highlight lack of competition in food pricing

The leader of Sweden’s Left Party, Nooshi Dadgostar, used a carrot as a visual aid during a televised debate on Monday to argue that grocery giants exploit weak competition to drive up food prices, SVT Nyheter reports.

In a segment on Aktuellt, Sweden’s flagship news programme, Dadgostar broke off the ends of a carrot, leaving the large middle section intact. The ends, she explained, represented the share of revenue going to farmers and VAT, while the bulk symbolised the profit retained by major food retailers.

“This is where competition is missing—that’s why the grocery giants can raise prices so drastically,” Dadgostar said. She argued that both consumers and farmers receive too small a portion of the total cost, calling for a larger share to be redirected to them.

The Left Party has proposed establishing a state Price and Cartel Authority to monitor pricing and enforce transparency. Under their plan, retailers failing to lower prices sufficiently would be legally required to submit pricing data for review.

Dadgostar criticised the current reduced VAT rate on food, implemented by the centre-right government, as ineffective without stronger oversight. “If you lower VAT, some of it may reach the customer—but without competition, it’s too easy for that money to end up in the pockets of the grocery giants,” she said. “We need an authority to control wholesale purchase prices.”

Opposition leader Ebba Busch of the Christian Democrats dismissed the proposal, accusing the Left Party of failing to understand “how business, economics, and growth work.” She warned that forced price reporting could worsen market concentration, citing past examples where price caps led to rationing.

Busch instead advocated for state measures to ease the approval process for new grocery stores, arguing that barriers to entry suppress competition from low-cost retailers. “This is a concrete proposal from the government to increase competition and keep prices down,” she said.

The debate echoes Dadgostar’s 2022 “falukorv stunt” (using a sausage to illustrate rising costs), which became a widely discussed moment in Sweden’s last election campaign. Monday’s carrot demonstration similarly aimed to visualise economic disparities in the food supply chain.