[Sweden’s right-wing parties are set to take power with a
razor-thin majority, ending eight years of social democratic
government. Sweden can look forward to four years of reactionary
politics where the democratic institutions are genuinely at risk.]
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SWEDEN: RIGHT-WING COALITION WINS ELECTION BY THE NARROWEST OF
MARGINS  
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Petter Nilsson and Rikard Warlenius
September 12, 2022
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation: Brussels Office
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_ Sweden’s right-wing parties are set to take power with a
razor-thin majority, ending eight years of social democratic
government. Sweden can look forward to four years of reactionary
politics where the democratic institutions are genuinely at risk. _

Ulf Kristersson, (EPP Via FLICKRCC by 2.0)

 

For the first time, this conservative coalition also includes the
far-right Sweden Democrats, who have emerged as the country’s second
largest party, despite their roots in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement.
The result is an evident decline for the progressive spectrum of
Swedish politics as a whole and the Left party in particular.

As of Monday, the right-wing bloc of Moderates, Christian Democrats,
Liberals and the far-right Sweden Democrats have won 49,7 % of the
vote, against the 48,8 % won by the other possible coalition of Social
Democrats, Left, Greens and Centre party. The final votes will be
counted on Wednesday but the Moderates leader Ulf Kristersson says he
is ready to start forming a government.

After the 2018 election, it took four months of negotiations before a
government could be appointed. Such a delay is unlikely this time,
with the emergence to two distinct political blocs. These blocs do not
signify a return to right and left as the dominating contest in
Swedish politics, however, and there are big political differences
within both coalitions. Indeed, the blocs were founded largely on the
question of whether the far-right Sweden Democrats should be allowed
to have an influence on the government or not. Four parties said no,
four other parties said yes.

The “No to SD” bloc is led by the Social Democrats, who spent the
election campaign triangulating the “Yes to SD” bloc in questions
regarding migration and law and order, while being unable to
articulate credible left economic policies since the bloc also
included the neoliberal Centre party. This also made the differences
between the possible government coalitions minimal. If the result
stands, the conservative right can form a government, but will do so
in the shadow of the Sweden Democrats becoming the second biggest
party.

The Left party has attempted to break out of the shadow of the Social
Democrats by going for a more classic social democratic profile, but
in the end lost 1,4 % from last election at the national level. The
overarching strategy for the Left party’s election campaign was to
gain ground rustbelt rural areas and this was not accomplished. The
Left party gained two to three percent in each of the three biggest
cities Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö – but this was not enough to
offset the general decline.

The far right is the only winner

Summing up the previous election in 2018, we argued that “the grand
narrative of the election is the decline of the two largest parties,
the Social Democrats and the Moderates, and the concurrent rise of the
Sweden Democrats
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Unfortunately, this still holds true – even more so this time
around. Some early votes, as well as votes from abroad, remain to be
counted, but everything points to the rightwing conservative coalition
winning by the slightest of margins. The Social Democrats gained 2,2 %
from the last election while the Moderates lost – but these shifts
say much less about the current situation than the rise of the Sweden
Democrats to the position of second biggest party in Sweden at 20,6 %.

The Sweden Democrats were formed in 1988 out of the “Keep Sweden
Swedish” movement and was composed of explicitly racist and neo-Nazi
groups uniting under a common banner. The Sweden Democrats have spent
the years since 1988 cleaning up their act, but it still remains an
almost single-issue, anti-immigration party, whose members
continuously slip-up, forget the new communication plan put in place
by the leadership, and write racist slurs under pseudonyms on the
internet.

The past 8 years have seen a plethora of negotiations to form
different minority constellations, particular one-off agreements to
pass reforms, and the ever-looming threat of new elections or votes of
no confidence. The Social Democrats have been the only party in
government during the last year, after the Green party left government
when the last budget vote saw the passing of the budget proposal from
the conservative-right coalition composed by the Moderates, Liberals,
and Christian Democrats. The Green party refused to govern on a budget
proposal negotiated with the xenophobic Sweden Democrats and which
entailed slashing climate reforms, so they promptly left government,
while the Social Democrats stayed and governed on an opposition
budget.

The Social Democrats response to declining voter share has been to try
to entice one or two of the rightwing parties into coalitions, thereby
undermining the ability of the Moderates to form a majority. The
Centre party disdain for the Sweden Democrats made them the likeliest
candidate, but they are neoliberal on economic issues and have exacted
a hefty price for their support. The only possible left coalition also
needs support of the Left party and the Greens. Centre party leader
Annie Lööf has explicitly stated that she will never support a
government with Left party ministers – or indeed even left policies.
Meanwhile, Left party leader Nooshi Dadgostar has stated that their
support is conditioned on being part of the government.

On the other side, the conservative-right bloc of the Moderates,
Liberals, and Christian Democrats have now normalised cooperation with
the Sweden Democrats, even though the other coalition partners
maintain that the latter are still too immature to have ministers in
government. With the Sweden Democrats as the biggest party in the
bloc, however, it will only be a matter of time before they claim
ministers. The Sweden Democrats will probably demand reforms first,
rather than ministerial roles, while they train their cadre with
presence in councils and committees.

Two unstable coalitions

This election campaign has been a continuous exposition of
unsuccessful populism, with the Social Democrats trying to win over
right-leaning voters by promising to restrict migration, be tough on
crime, increase military spending, accommodate business interests and
not put forward any major tax reforms. The conservative right’s
campaign was not much different, so the election largely centered on
the credibility of the party leaders and their personal ability to
form a government and “lead Sweden”. With both coalitions being
relatively loose, there was plenty of room for maneuvering and
populist proposals by the individual parties – it didn’t matter if
they were internally contradictory, as any necessary accommodations
could take place after the election. This dynamic has evidently been
most successful for the Sweden Democrats.

After the previous election, a cordon sanitaire against the Sweden
Democrats was formalised in the “January Agreement”, where the
Social Democrats could rule with the support of the Greens, Liberals
and Centre party and with the toleration of the Left party. This
agreement came with 73 concrete reforms – with a strong right
leaning profile – but was only partly carried out. In 2021 the Left
party called for a vote of no confidence in the government to stop a
policy set to replace negotiated rents with markets rents in the
housing sector.

This meant the collapse of the January Agreement and, in quick
succession, the cordon sanitaire was broken and the Moderates, the
Christian Democrats, and – most recently – the Liberals started
openly cooperating with the Sweden Democrats. Now these parties are
aiming to form a government whose shared solutions to the biggest
policy challenges outside of crime and migration still remain unclear.

Major issues

The Russian invasion of Ukraine initiated a rapid change in the 200
year old military non-alignment policy and, within a few weeks of the
war’s opening shots, Sweden had applied for membership in NATO.
Turkey´s autocratic leader Erdogan sensed an opportunity and listed
his demands to allow Sweden’s entry, including the extradition of 33
mainly Kurdish residents of Sweden, as well as an end to any support
for the YPG troops in Syria.

Social Democrat foreign minister Ann Linde had just a few months
earlier declared the YPG to be heroes for their struggle against ISIS,
yet the same foreign minister was soon negotiating terms with Turkey.
Old friends are now left to fend for themselves, Kurds are to be
extradited to torture, and only the Left party is still able to
criticise Turkey’s abuse of human rights – but the Social
Democrats succeeded in removing the issue of joining NATO from the
election campaign in just a few swift moves.

The question of crime has been one of the major issues of the
election. For the first time ever in Sweden, voters have rated crime
“most important issue” in polls. The facts tell quite different
stories, depending on which ones you choose to focus on. On the one
hand, lethal violence in Sweden has been constant for several decades
and is now actually slightly lower than in the 80s and 90s.

However, the last few years have also seen a large increase in gun
violence and deaths between warring gangs in the major cities. Even
though these are mainly internal disputes of a few hundred people, the
resulting shootouts have taken place in public spaces and has spread a
general mood of fear and impending chaos, fed by tabloids and
right-wing pundits and more often than not seen as a consequence of
“unrestrained” immigration.

The Social Democrats have legislated higher sentences, increased
funding and allowed more repressive powers for the police. They have
also started to explicitly discussed crime rates as a result of
excessive immigration. The conservative right has followed suit and
are of course willing to go even further: the Moderates proposing
“stop and search” areas where no suspicion is needed for police
intervention, the Christian democrat leader asking why police didn’t
severely injure more civilians after riots, and the Sweden Democrats
suggesting the eviction of the whole family of anyone convicted.

The Left party election campaign

The Left party adopted a classical social democratic agenda of big
investments to counter the economic downturn. These investments are
specifically directed towards countryside and “rustbelt” areas as
way to counter the decline of large parts of rural Sweden. The
underlying idea is to bridge their current electoral support of young
progressives in cities with winning over working-class voters in
industrial towns who used to be predominantly social democratic but
now lean towards the Sweden Democrats. This attempt has caused
conflict with some sectors of the party as well as with the
environmental movement, both of whom have seen the pandering to major
industries and economic growth as a step away from the previous focus
on climate reform.

The Left party leadership has responded that green reform should not
come at the price of “common folk” and that large investment in
“green growth” is the path forward. The Left party image is to be
revamped from what – according to this analysis – has been too
much focus on moral and individual responsibilities and a new
communication strategy was drawn up. No longer should one feel bad for
flying to Mallorca for holidays, eating meat and driving big cars.
Whether or not this was intended to also communicate that climate
would no longer have the same priority, it seems that this was how it
was received, with critique ensuing both internally and from within
the climate justice movement.

The challenge to join city and countryside, young progressives and
traditional blue-collar workers is still an unsolved question for many
European left parties and the Left Party’s move to find a larger
voter base has not yet come to fruition, with an election result
almost 1,5 % worse than last time. Part of this loss can be explained
by the framing of the election debate – it has been hard for the
Left to navigate an election run around crime, migration and NATO.
Some of those lost votes were tactical support for the Green party in
the final weeks before the election, as the party was in risk of
falling under the 4 % parliamentary threshold, which would have
ensured victory for the conservative right.

But the movement from Left to Green likely has both pull and push
factors: tactical support for the Greens and discontent with how the
Left has de-emphasised environmental issues. If the strategy was to
strengthen support in blue-collar small towns while taking the
calculated risk of losing some urban progressive voters, it only
half-succeeded: the Left lost urban voters to the Green party, but
also small town-voters to the Social Democrats.

Now is the time of monsters

For many Swedish people the current election was a referendum on the
concept of allowing the Sweden Democrats to be part of the government.
The position on this was the main thing holding together the two
coalitions. The Centre party is in economic terms further to the right
than some of the parties in the conservative right bloc, but their
refusal to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats forced them into the
Social Democrat’s coalition.

Parties in the rightwing coalition, however, have also had divisive
internal conflicts about cooperating with such an explicitly
xenophobic party as the Sweden Democrats. The leader of the moderates
Ulf Kristersson - likely to be the new prime minister – famously
promised holocaust survivor Heidi Fried that he would never cooperate
with the Sweden Democrats. The conservative right bloc has rapidly
gone from promising never to negotiate with the Sweden Democrats, to
saying that ministers from the Sweden Democrats is unthinkable “for
now”.

These populist maneuverings and bricoleur coalitions are also an
expression of the lack of any historical bloc in the Gramscian sense,
i.e. a stable political project tied to a class formation and cohering
institutions. The 2008 financial crisis halted the wave of neoliberal
reforms in Sweden, but was not replaced with any political project
with a basis in class, or indeed any other social formations.

The privatisation of the welfare sector was rampant but the resulting
housing shortage, school system failure and faltering healthcare
sector makes it impossible to keep pushing on with the promise of more
markets to solve current market problems. Even the right chooses to
focus more on crime and migration rather than economic issues since
their age-old maxims of markets and freedom are not too popular at the
moment.

The differences between the blocs on economic policy are also pretty
slim, and the main difference in the coming years will be the policing
of suburbs and borders. As a recent tweet aptly put it, the difference
between the Centre party and the Liberal party (and their coalitions)
is whether you will make things worse for poor migrants because they
are poor or because they have migrated.

Both the Social Democrats and the Left party are vying for the same
disgruntled working class voters that has largely gone to the Sweden
Democrats. This is a more recent development in Sweden than many other
European countries and there is a lot of debate as to how to reach
voters who drifted from the Social Democrats to the Sweden Democrats.
The Social Democrats are attempting to triangulate them by analysing
more and more social issues as results of excessive migration. The
Left party believes that these voters will be won back by a classic
social democratic strategy of industrial renewal and welfare expansion
– while toning down radical parts of the party program as well as
some aspects of identity politics. 

Who remembers Sweden? 

The equitable Sweden of the late 70s is by now long gone, even though
it maintains a phantom existence in the self-image of many Swedes. The
economy has been doing well through the pandemic and the growth of
capital assets have meant that parts of the middle-class have seen
their fortunes grow rapidly by owning a house or stock market shares.
This tendency increased when the pandemic meant that those able to
work from home needed more room, and housing prices soared.

With the recent rise of inflation and a looming recession, the central
bank is now slowly raising from interest rates from the zero that has
been the norm for the previous years and the housing market is slowly
adjusting. A more rapid fall would reveal many households unable to
pay mortgages and the resulting decline in consumption would mean a
cascading crisis for the Swedish economy. The secular decline of the
tax rate is also beginning to show, with the health care system unable
to face the pandemic or even staff hospitals during summer. According
to a report by the Ministry of Finance
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extra money needed to finance current levels of welfare in 2026 is
between 50-80 billion Swedish crowns.

Sweden’s energy market has faced a twofold problem. Integration into
the European market meant that Sweden exports electricity until the
prices even out, which – especially for southern Sweden – has
meant a stark increase in energy prices. A rapid increase in energy
demands has also meant periodic shortages of capacity during peak
hours. Two nuclear plants were closed in 2015 as a result of a
declining market and few would have guessed then that building new
nuclear power plants would ever become politically viable.

This energy crisis was strongly exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and
– according to the political right – the nuclear phase-out
policies of the green left, and all the political parties have
scrambled to subsidise fuel and electricity. Even though climate
change has been part of the campaign, the idea that climate politics
might disrupt consumption patterns is evidently off the table at the
moment. All parties are competing to subsidise current consumption
rates, while to differing degrees (mostly the Left and the Greens)
talking about large climate reforms somewhere down the line. With the
conservative right in power, climate reform will most certainly be
halted.

The next four years

With the current gridlock in political majorities, Sweden can look
forward to four years of reactionary politics where the democratic
institutions are genuinely at risk. When in power locally, the Sweden
Democrats have tried to interfere with the independence of civil
servants and have broken the “arm’s length” agreement between
politics and civil society with, for example, ordering the removal of
rainbow flags.

With the Social Democrats collapsing into the center, there is a large
empty area on the left of the Swedish political landscape, but the
Left party has failed to capitalise. The attempts of the Left’s
current leadership to bridge the city and countryside, young
progressives and blue-collar workers, has not yet born fruit. The Left
saw slight increases in cities, with 11-15 % in each of the three
biggest cities, but did worse in smaller rural areas than in towns.
This is a familiar problem but is more critical in an election
campaign where the explicit goal was to change the voter dynamic of
urban growth and rural decline.

The Left’s potential for growth in the cities is probably not large
enough to deliver a national breakthrough, but the current strategy of
updating the party profile did not deliver either nationally or on its
own terms. It takes time to change the image of a party and the
current remodeling did take into account that there could be lost
elections before such a bridging could be accomplished. However, the
movement towards a more centrist populist agenda will see criticism in
the coming years if it does not deliver votes.

There have been increased contacts between the Left party and labor
union leaders traditionally tied to the Social Democrats although it
remains to be seen if this can be translated into rank-and-file
support. Besides the rift between city and countryside, there are some
starkly gendered voting patterns emerging, with female voters much
more likely to vote left and green, but with young males in particular
voting for the far right.

Cracks are apparent in the welfare system as well, and people are
increasingly skeptical about the privatisations of the past two
decades. The welfare gap means that there is great potential for
countercyclical politics in the coming economic downturn. The old
welfare alliance between blue-collar workers and middle-class
progressives remains a possibility, and there is a clear majority in
favour of investments targeted towards green transformation in
neglected regions, alongside increased taxes to strengthen the public
sector. The entailing shift from private to public consumption would
also mean a solution to the dilemma of “individual vs collective
responsibility” on climate issues.

The Left needs to present clear and concise break with neoliberal
austerity ideology in economic policies, and to neutralise the
conflict on crime and migration that is now dividing the blue-collar
workers and middle-class progressives who make up a potential base of
left support. Either as a political project to overcome this divide,
or the successful shifting of the “most important issues” back to
conflicts on which it can be built, such a class alliance will only be
constructed by an overarching political agenda that is able to instill
enthusiasm. How it is to be done remains as much the conundrum of the
Swedish left as it is of the wider European left as well. 

_Petter Nilsson works for the Left party in Stockholm, he is a member
of the Centre for Marxist Social Studies._

_Rikard Warlenius is a Left party city council member in Stockholm and
lecturer in Human Ecology at University of Gothenburg._

_The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung is an internationally operating, left
non-profit organisation for civic education affiliated with
Germany’s ‘Die Linke’ (Left Party). Active since 1990, the
foundation has been committed to the analysis of social and political
processes and developments worldwide. We work in favour of a more just
world system based on international solidarity._

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