Few Cloudy
Labour concessions reached with all 60ish SAS unions, including the mastodont CC union. CC took a very heavy pay cut, so they're now on par with the industry average for majors in Europe.
In short, SAS has completed their 2 Billion Euro savings plan and has, as promised, launched a number of new routes. As part of the plan, SAS now has 3 mainline divisions (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), a low-cost arm (Snowflake) and a commuter division flying the turboprops (SAS Commuter). They've also abondoned the, very expensive, CC rule which saw CC's placed on flights according to their home country and the proportion of stake that country held in SAS. So you'd have 2 Danes, 2 Noggies and 3 Swedes in the cabin, and SAS would spend gazillions positioning them back and forth between CPH, OSL and ARN no to mention the per diems and hotel costs.
Basically, SAS management told staff to either accepts cuts, which would allow the airline to expand, or reject the proposals and witness downsizing on a monumental scale. It will, however, be interesting to see how long SAS will make good on their promises before they start outsourcing to Spanair, Blue1 etc.
Wasn't Air France, at one point, looking at acquireing a stake in Alitalia? Did that evaporate with their merger with KLM?