News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 15th November 2024
Emails showed that a Swedish government minister’s allergy to bananas is so strong that staffers attempt to remove the fruit from rooms before she enters, making it a national discussion point. The minister of gender equality and work-life balance, Paulina Brandberg, has previously discussed her banana phobia, calling it “the world’s weirdest phobia.”
Leaked emails this week showed that her staff have gone to great measures to ensure she does not come into contact with the fruit.The correspondence, published by the newspaper Expressen, includes an email to the Swedish speaker’s office in September stipulating that “no traces of bananas must be in the room” before she attended a meeting with a colleague, owing to a “strong allergy”.
According to other emails, her staff said there must not be any bananas in any of the spaces she entered at an event she was attending. “We will secure the conference so that there are no bananas,” read the response. “I have all the respect for people who have different phobias,” he said. “I am disturbed when a hard-working cabinet minister is almost reduced to a phobia and people make fun of it. I think you should be too good for that.”
Brandberg told sources that she was “getting professional help with” the problem. The education minister, Johan Pehrson, a fellow Liberal, said the media attention in response to the revelations was “absurd”. “She is a staunch liberal and former prosecutor. Often in cases where she stood on the side of vulnerable women. We should all be able to focus on that instead,” he wrote on X.
Opposition figures have also expressed support for Brandberg. The legal policy spokesman for the Social Democrats, Teresa Carvalho, claimed to share the same fear. “On this issue, we stand united against a common enemy, despite the fact that we have had many difficult debates about working conditions,” she wrote.
