A diplomatic fight is breaking out inside the European Union over France’s decision to ban nicotine pouches outright — and Sweden, the country that effectively invented the modern category, is leading the pushback. Sweden’s trade minister told the Financial Times this week that France’s ban amounts to “an attack on the Swedish way of living,” opening a single-market dispute that has now drawn formal complaints from seven member states.
What France’s decree actually does
France implemented its ban last month after passing the underlying decree in September 2025. The measure goes considerably further than any other prohibition in Europe: it doesn’t only ban sales, it bans imports, possession, and use. A Swedish traveler arriving in France with a tin of pouches legally purchased at home is, on paper, exposed to penalties of up to five years in prison and a €375,000 fine.
Parts of the decree have already been put on hold. France’s highest administrative court, the Conseil d’État, has temporarily suspended the production and export provisions of the ban after a domestic producer challenged the measure. The possession and sales bans, however, remain in force.
Stockholm’s response
Swedish trade minister Benjamin Dousa took the dispute directly to the European press. Speaking to the FT, Dousa compared the French move to Sweden banning French baguettes or French wine. “It is absurd,” he said, framing the ban as both a single-market violation and a cultural assault on a Swedish tradition that long predates the modern pouch.
In Sweden, we have had a relationship with snus since the 1600s. So this is an attack on the Swedish way of living.— Benjamin Dousa, Swedish trade minister, speaking to the FT
The historical framing matters here. Nicotine pouches as a tobacco-free product were developed in Sweden in the 2010s, but they’re descended directly from snus — the powdered oral tobacco that has been part of Scandinavian life since the 17th century. When Sweden joined the EU in 1995, it negotiated a specific exemption from the bloc’s ban on oral tobacco, which means snus has remained legal on the Swedish market for the past three decades. From Stockholm’s perspective, France’s ban targets a category that’s culturally embedded in Sweden in a way few outsiders fully appreciate.
The single-market complaint
Sweden isn’t going it alone. Italy, Greece, and four other countries have joined in raising formal concerns that the French ban may breach EU law. The argument is straightforward: a member state cannot criminalize possession of a product that is legally sold in other member states without running afoul of single-market rules guaranteeing free movement of goods and people.
“From our perspective, it is not in line with the single market,” Dousa told the FT.
The dispute has spilled into the European Parliament’s Strasbourg sessions, where five Swedish Social Democrat MEPs have threatened to stop attending in protest. In a letter to Parliament president Roberta Metsola, the group wrote that the French decree “strikes at the heart of the Union’s internal market” and creates direct consequences for the free movement of EU citizens — who, under the current rules, risk criminal sanctions simply for traveling through France.
One European diplomat quoted by the FT described France’s position as “ironic,” given that France has historically been one of the strongest champions of single-market rules.
Why the rest of Europe is split
The deeper issue is that nicotine pouches sit in a regulatory gap. EU tobacco rules don’t cover them, because they don’t contain tobacco. That has left member states to write their own restrictions while Brussels works on an update to its tobacco framework — the first such review since 2014, and one that diplomats say is already drawing some of the heaviest industry lobbying ever seen in the EU.
The result is a fractured map. Belgium and the Netherlands have banned sales. Finland has opted for tighter marketing rules instead of an outright prohibition. France is the only major member state to target the entire supply chain — production, import, sale, possession, and use. Sweden, of course, sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, with a regulated domestic market and an established export industry.
The producer perspective
The industry is using the dispute to push for a unified EU framework rather than 27 separate national regimes. Philip Morris International’s Europe boss Massimo Andolina told the FT that an updated EU tobacco directive is necessary because the market has changed so significantly since the current rules were written.
We find ourselves in this senseless situation where nobody is talking about regulating or banning cigarettes anymore, but everyone is talking about banning smoke-free products.— Massimo Andolina, head of Europe at Philip Morris International
French anti-smoking campaigners, for their part, are less worried about consumers than producers. François Topart of the anti-smoking association CNTC told the FT the focus of campaigning is on commercialisation rather than individual users — suggesting the harshest penalties may end up applied more selectively than the headline numbers suggest.
What this means for the EU pouch market
The Sweden-France clash is a preview of the fight that’s coming when Brussels actually proposes new rules. Member states are roughly split between countries that view nicotine pouches as a legitimate harm-reduction tool — Sweden, the Nordics, parts of southern Europe — and countries treating them as a youth-uptake risk to be suppressed entirely. The Commission is going to have to land somewhere on that spectrum, and whatever it does will set the regulatory baseline for one of the fastest-growing consumer categories in Europe.
The European Commission and the French health ministry did not respond to FT requests for comment. The single-market complaint from Sweden and its six counterpart member states is now the most credible legal pressure point on the French ban, and it’s the avenue most likely to determine whether France’s approach holds or gets rolled back.
