Sports diplomacy seen to bolster PH-Sweden ties

FILE: Swedish Ambassador to Manila Harald Fries. (PNA Photo)

MANILA— Swedish Ambassador to Manila Harald Fries sees sports diplomacy, particularly the promotion of floorball in the Philippines, as a means to bolster the improving Stockholm-Manila bilateral ties.

“On sports diplomacy, I’m not so sure that they will pick it up actually but that is something that I will promote very much here and the embassy,” he told reporters on the sides of the Sweden National Day reception in Makati on Thursday.

The present-day floorball, a sport akin to ice hockey, was made popular in Sweden.

Fries said it was one of the sports recently included in the Southeast Asian Games.

“In Sweden, we have quite a few Filipinos who have dual citizenships and some of them are very good floorball players, so now we are recruiting some of them from Sweden to play in the Philippine national team to combine forces with local Filipinos,” he said.

On June 6, the Swedish embassy in Manila hosted a reception in Makati for its national day, where the envoy also highlighted the strong ties between the two states, particularly on trade.

Fries said the high-level engagement between Filipino and Swedish officials on various aspects of cooperation are continuous.

And this year, representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs will, in fact, visit Stockholm for a bilateral consultation with the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“It will be at the undersecretary level. I think the biggest area of cooperation and relationship between our countries is trade so I think that would be the main topic,” he said.

The envoy said discussions might also touch on a multilateral level, which includes looking into the impacts of the trade dispute between the United States and China.

“Sweden and I think the Philippines also are very supportive of the multilateral trading system, it has to be strengthened because small countries like us rely on these multilateral institutions such as World Trade Organization, so I’m sure that will be one topic also,” he noted.