Talk Elections

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30306992 (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30306992)

Enjoy the chaos. :P

Damn, I posted a thread literally seconds after this one. :P

I suppose this year must have been like heaven for political junkies in Sweden. ;)

Good god.

Its only fair that the Sweden thread is created by a Swede (or Scanian..).

Its an awful long campaign, who is that most likely to benefit? I guess the centre-right has the most cash, but SAP is probably better funded than most SD parties.

Just checked the election calendar, it turns out this Riksdag thing will collide with the very exciting and totally wide open presidential election in Uzbekistan! Very inconsiderate... :P

I wonder what they will do if the result is status quo  - i.e. Red-Green Bloc larger than Alliance, but Sweden Democrats holding balance of power again. Suppose they can't call another early election. :P

This will be the first such election in 57 years - really saying something about how dramatic this is. Feeling slightly bitter that Norway is the only country in Europe (I've heard) where an early election is constitutionally impossible...  

The Swedish pols would be under hard pressure to try a Grand Coalition if the outcome is status quo.



I believe you share that honour with Moldova, but it's a shame you can't join the Sweden Finland, Denmark, Åland, Faroe Islands 2015 elections bonanza.

I tend to think that SD will get hurt by in the election and lose support for acting in a way that led to this crisis. 

Yeah, I already had a feeling that this minority government would have a tough time and eventually w/could collapse (just not this early).

We can but hope.

Help me understand, why would an anti-system party be punished for bringing down a government? I do not see it.

They might punish Alliance parties, if they like the current government, but I guess they would have to be Alliance voters who prefer left-wing policies, if there are many of those.

It strikes me as an outsider that the gap between the government and the Alliance is not so big that centrists looking for stability would feel the need to switch to the government.

Antonio summed it up perfectly in the other thread:

Can't really blame a duck for being a duck. It was wishful thinking to ever imagine the Swedish Democrats were going to drop up a centre-left government.

Will Reinfeldt be leading the Moderates in this election?

In answer to the OP - the miners, obviously.

Nope, Anna Kinberg Batra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Kinberg_Batra) will be elected as their new leader in January, and she has already unofficially taken over after Reinfeldt.

Her background sounds upper class/upper middle class. Is that going to be a problem? How posh is she?

What exactly was so contentious about the budget?

I wonder what would have happened had the Social Democrats and Green coalition given the Democrats a little of what they wanted on asylum.  Say a partial reduction of overall numbers, maybe not as much as the Democrats wanted, but enough for the Democrats to say to their people that they accomplished something by voting Democrat.  Plus, one would think that among the Green and Social Democrat electorate there would be some who would also support a reduction.

Well lets just put it like this, when she first ran for parliament she uttered these infamous words while  being interviewed: "People from Stockholm are, in my opinion, smarter than country hicks. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM-ByPAD48w)" (Loose translation)

...So yeah!

Anyway nowadays she's married to folksy and popular comedian David Batra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu5SQ4qgcJY). So at least she has that. :P

Indeed, especially among the Social Democrat voters. In 2013, 40% of the Social Democrat voters and 21% of Green voters thought that it was a good or very good idea to take less refugees into Sweden. The number among all voters is 44%.
But while the Social-Democrats might be able to satisfy a significant part of their voters by agreeing to cut immigrant and refugee numbers, it will very difficult for them to act if they were to do so. First of all, there would still not, at least in the short term, be a majority for reducing immigration, and it would make it very hard for them to work with the other left wing parties, the Green and the Left Party voters are those most in favour of immigration.

The numbers also show that the point for the Sweden Democrats is not so much to convince people that the immigrants and refugee numbers are too high, but to activate the quite significant amount of voters with that attitude in the other parties, what the Sweden Democrats have referred to several times in recent days as the "silent majority". They simply need to get that question as high up the agenda as possible.

http://www.som.gu.se/digitalAssets/1487/1487702_071-082-sandberg-o-demker.pdf

Ipsos for Dagens Nyheter:

Share of voters who believe they will vote for the same party in the new election

Not looking good for the Christian Democrats, who only just passed the threshold at the last election. Perhaps many of their loan voters from last time is considering to change their vote this time. The same is to a lesser extent true for the (Liberal) People's Party. The threshold is 4%, KD got 4.57% and FP 5.42% at the last election.

The article doesn't provide numbers for all the parties, but it says that the Sweden Democrats is the party with the biggest potential to increase its share of the votes. 3/10 of the Allianse voters who consider changing party, is considering to vote for SD, while the same is the case for 2/10 of the red-green voters who consider changing their vote.

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/kd-ligger-samst-till-infor-nyvalet/

I would be shocked if either of the Alliance parties did not cross the treshold. If they hover around it, they are always "saved" by supporters of the other three parties.

What surprise me the most is how mindblowing stupid the old parties have been. I personal think it's the other parties full right, not wanting to deal with SD, but it should demand one of these three things.

1: A grand coalition, German style.
2: A centre right government which SD wouldn't topple.
3: A grand agreement, that the anti-SD parties would vote in favour of what a majority among anti-SD parties agreed to do, even if they made up a minority of MPs in the Swedish parliament.

Of course I expect the Swedes to have learnt nothing from this mess.

This may not hold if two of them are in trouble at the same time. If we are looking at a big swing to SD, as the numbers Diouf posted suggest, we could be in uncharted territory.

I doubt it will happen, though if SD significantly increases its vote share then there is a chance, yes. Though I wonder what SD's ceiling is - I would have thought (or hoped) that they're pretty close to it by now. They've already almost polled as well as DF's best Folketing result, and DF doesn't have the baggage of SD.

I think the fact that 44% say that Sweden should take less refugees, and no one else seem to represent them in any way, indicate that SD have a potential very high ceiling, I don't think they have a 44% ceiling, but there is a lot of room to grow in between that and their last result.

Well, DF is polling at 21% now..

(not that I think it necessarily makes sense to compare Denmark and Sweden in this context)

What's the Feminist Initiative's plan this time around lol?

* Some 26% of Swedes polled by DN/Ipsos want next government to be led by the Social Democrats and to consist of parties from both political blocs.
* 40% say some kind of cooperation across blocs good for Sweden
* Only 2% of surveyed voters would like current government constellation with Social Democrats and Green Party
* 19% want Alliance government, led by Moderate Party
* Some 20% of voters want next government to cooperate with Sweden Democrats
* DN/Ipsos polled 1,006 Swedish voters online Dec. 3-4

Seems like SD's ceiling could be up to 20%.

* Sweden government’s Social Democrats and Green Party, combined with Left Party, backed by 41.7% of voters in Expressen/Demoskop poll.
* Four-party alliance, with Moderate Party, Centre Party, Liberal Party, Christian Democrats, also backed by 41.7%
* Sweden Democrats backed by 13.5%
* Expressen/Demoskop polled 1,250 voters Nov. 25-Dec. 3; government called new election on Dec. 3 after budget failed to win enough support in parliament

Looks like we might need to go to grand coalition after election. 

Your reference of it is a bit selective..

14% wants S, V and MP, so the combined support for a leftist government is 16%. Which is still very low of course, but roughly the same as the 19% for an Alliance government,

Twice as many voters want an S led Grand Coalition (26%) as an M led Grand Coalition (14%).

10% says "Other", which is most likely people hoping for an Alliance + SD government, since that is the option not polled, but that is a guess.

No less than 15% don't know.

So basically more voters still want an S led coalition (42%), than an M led (33%), which is after all good news for SAP, but that is provided the rump 10% are not mainly SD supporters.

Regarding the Blame Game:

35% blame the government for the crisis
24% SD
17% Alliance
10% Other (which is a LOL option in this context, though it may be the big bad media)
14% Dunno

So this is bad news for SAP, but very good (and a bit undeserved IMO) news for the Alliance.

Regarding the polls, I can see that the polls before the last election almost uniformly underestimated SD. The four polls from the election day gave SD 8.3%, 10.5%, 10.2%, and 10.4% while their actual election result was 12.9%. The pollster which was closest to capture the strength of SD was Sentio, which in the last three polls listed before the election predicted 11.8%, 13.5% and 12.5%.
It doesn't really seem like there has been any alignment between Sentio and the other polls. The other pollsters currently show SD results between 11.8% and 13.8%, while Sentio's SD results in the two recent polls have been 16.7% and 16.4%.

I've looked at the polls listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_general_election,_2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_general_election,_2015

Though presumably polls at this stage are almost meaningless? This seems like the sort of election in which the campaign will be critical.

I think the blame poll is the most important, it sets the stage and reveals that it is going to be an uphill battle for SAP to sell their narrative of the crisis.  The second most important is the preferred government poll with a plurality for a Grand Coalition. It confirms that Swedes remain consensus seekers and that going on the attack will likely backfire.

The actual polling numbers for the parties at this point are much less interesting.

So great, Sweden is basically going to become Austria.

A non-ideological grand coalition is only going to increase the popularity of anti-system parties.

Which will of course make force a permanent grand coalition.

Vicious cycle.

I accept my accolades ?

Latest Yougov poll (first after the new elections called) shows the Sweden Democrats on 17,7%.

S  29,6 (+0,1)
MP  6,9 (-1,1)
V   4,7 (-2,1)
FI 2,5 (-2,5)

RedGreen bloc: 41,2

M  23,1 (+1,9)
C   5,7 (-0,7)
FP  5,0 (-1,2)
KD  4,2 (-1,6)

Alliance bloc: 38,0

SD 17,7 (+6,6)

Welcome to the forum.

Thank you!

Thanks for poll figures. On those numbers, it is interesting that:
1. SAP + SD have almost half of all effective votes. Any majority must include either SAP or SD, because of V, but they don't have one alone.
2. SAP + MP need at least three smaller parties for a majority, be it V or Alliance.
3. M + SD would need at least two Alliance parties.

Can I get a sense from Swedes or Scandinavians... first, is SD anywhere near ready for government, and second, are the larger parties anywhere near ready to be supported by SD?

The answer to both questions is no.

Furthermore, why would SD want anything to do with government? They stand to benefit from being the outsider party.

The answer to both questions is hell no.

To elaborate a bit:

The leader of the Moderates in Scania has been positive towards cooperation with SD, but Scania is more anti-immigration than the rest of Sweden. There are apparently a handfull of Moderate MPs that are privately positive about it (when asked anonymously), but it is still a very marginal position and there is no reason to believe this will change in the near future (though it may in the long run if SD remains a factor).

I have a really hard time seeing SD stop being a factor, even if the party self destruct in some incredible way, a new party will just rise and replace it. There are a significant segment of the Swedish population who are unhappy with the Swedish immigration policy and the immigrants in Sweden. That will not just disappear. 

Yeah. Even outsiders want to be in government or to influence the government, especially if no-one else is adopting their ideas and trying to steal their supporters away. It is hard to get one's agenda implemented outside government, given the tendency of modern party systems to concentrate power, due to EU inter-governmentalism and higher demands for public transparency in politics. The point of doing well in elections is not just to maintain purity and do well in future elections.

I can see why the extent of compromise or toxicity might be too much for either side to bear right now. The Danish People's Party achieved a lot because it was willing to support governments, and vice versa. It sounds like Swedish politics (at least at elite level) is not yet ready to deal with the more infamous SD. Still, without them, the options are now grand coalitions or five-party alliances.

What are the number is parentheses supposed to indicate (since they don't show the difference with the election results)?

Its the difference to the last YouGov poll.

The most likely development IMO is that SD-Moderate cooperation on the local level will over time make it more legit and natural to cooperate on the national level.

Just an interesting realization that if in the case the Moderate Party did form government again would mean that Denmark, Norway and Sweden would all have a female as their Prime Minister.

Yes it's time that Sweden end their hostility toward women and join the other Scandinavian countries in the 21th century.

Clearly, this would resolve all problems of unemployment or immigration in Sweden...

This looks like it's going to be a train-wreck. Hopefully red-greens run a good campaign and put the blame where it belongs.

It is mildly amusing that Sweden of all places will be the last Nordic country to get a female head of government, even if the two they have had in Finland only were in office for 14 Months combined, but then they had Red Tarja as President so that kinda weighs it up. Even the Faroe Islands have had one, all though also just for 14 Months.

Well, it's less amusing when you consider that Anna Lindh would almost certainly have been Prime Minister if she wasn't murdered. :(

Anna Kinberg Batra has been officially nominated as new M-leader. Obviously just a formality by now.

Löfven said they will campaign for a change in government. Amusing misstep. He also called SD neo-fascist but then failed to define fascism when asked about it (he rambled something about how fascists respect democracy).

In Skåne, amusingly, the Red-Greens faced a similar problem as nationally but solved it by voting for the SD budget.

Poll from Sverige tycker.

Who do you want to see as Prime Minister after the elections:

37% - Stefan Löfvén (S)
28% - Anna Kinberg Batra (M)
11% - Annie Lööf (C)
  8% - Jimmie Åkesson (SD)
  6% - Jonas Sjöstedt (V)
  3% - Gustav Fridolin (MP) / Jan Björklund (FP)
  2% - Göran Hägglund (KD)
>1% - Åsa Romsson (MP) / Mattias Karlsson (SD)

There are so many amusing things with this poll. Too bad it's from a polling firm I've never ever heard of before. :P

Anyway if we ponder that it is indeed correct, the number of people who wants the next government lead by a left-wing Prime Minister, and the ones who wants a Prime Minister from the Alliance, is almost equal.     


They can try, but so far the indicators seem to be that they're not so good at pinning the blame on their opponents.

Sverige tycker has now also released a traditional opinion poll:

V - 4,2%
S - 31,0%
MP- 5,8%

Government + supporters = 41,1%

M - 26,9%
C - 7,4%
FP - 4,8%
KD - 4,3%

Alliance = 43,4%

SD -14,0%

Others (including FI) - 1,6% (chuckles)

 

If you put together the most recent polls from Demoskop, Yougov, Sentio and Sverigetycker/Inizio you get this result:

V - 5,1%
S - 29,4%
MP- 7,0%

Government + supporters = 41,5%

M - 25,2%
C - 6,2%
FP - 4,8%
KD - 4,1%

Alliance = 40,3%

SD -15,7%

Others (including FI) - 2,6%

The liberal FP seems to be going the same way as the german FDP while the Center Party under the leadership of Annie Lööf have a strong momentum. C and M will be the winners in the Alliance while KD and FP will be lucky to remain above the 4% threshold. The numbers for the greens seem to be stable but my guess is that a lot of voters from V, MP and FI will be wandering of to S soon. SD will be the big winners of this election so their gamble with voting down the governments budget seems to have paid of for now.

How come? It could bring V in danger if true.

 I remember Netherlands, where  VVD and PVDA polarized election enough to get  majority to do a great coalition.
Wouldn't be wise for one of Alliance parties to leave it and run independently?

A. What does that have to do with my question/comment? (or did you just quote it by accident?

B. Not sure what you mean. Do you mean "Wouldn't it be wise for one of Alliance parties to leave it and run independently?

- that wouldn't really give them an advantage. They are four independent parties - just committed to cooperation. If one party left the Alliance it would make it a risky bid for bourgeois voters (might make a deal with SAP) and cost them support.

No Alliance party is willing to break the Alliance in it's current form. Hypothetically FP could choose Birgitta Olsson as party leader and move more to the left or KD could choose Ebba Busch Thor and move in a more conservative direction (and thereby get a whole lot more support in the polls) but the thing is any breakup of the Alliance would basically mean a chance for the Social Democrats to reestablish the political hegemony over Sweden that they have had for the last 30-40 years.  Nobody in the blue bloc wants to be responsible for giving the Social Democrats that position again which is why you've seen Annie Lööf and co in the Center Party rejecting all forms of cooperation with Löfven. If the Center Party or the Liberals agree to cooperate with the Social Democrats in any issue without the rest of the Alliance being in on the deal it would basically undo these last 8 years of non-socialist rule.

This will be interesting to watch... I'm not terribly familiar with Swedish politics, but I'll still be eager to see what parties will form government post-election.

First poll done by phone since new elections declared confirms my theory that Greens, leftists and feminists are flocking to the Social Democrats for a more stable government. SDs increase in Yougov and Sentio seems to be confirmed by Novus while Liberal FP (ALDE) and Christian Democrats (EPP) are in danger of losing representation in parliament by missing the 4% threshold for parliamentary seats. A result giving only 2 Alliance parties parliamentary representation would send shockwaves through Swedens political system.

Novus December (Comparison to last election results):

S: 32,0 (+1,0)
MP: 6,0 (-0,9)
V: 5,3 (-0,4)

Redgreens: 43,3 (-0,3)

M: 23,7 (+0,4)
FP: 4,3 (-1,1)
C: 6,6 (+0,5)
KD: 3,9 (-0,7)

Alliance: 38,5 (-0,9)

SD: 16,0 (+3,1)

Others: 2,8 (-1,9)

And when I left the forum I thought things couldn't possibly get worse politically around the world...

It seems like the Sweden Democrats may have a bit of an anti-Semitism problem:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/17/swedish-far-right-leader-jews-swedes

From the article:

So being anti-Sami and anti-Kurd as well makes it OK then?  Or is he being misrepresented?

Not sure how much it will hurt them. Basically he is just saying that Jews/Sami/Kurds can have Swedish nationality, but can not be ethnically Swedish unless they assimilate. I know many Sami would agree to this distinction between ethnicity and nationality. Its touchy for the Jewish community for obvious reasons, but I think most SD voters already have an ethnic Swede/citizen Swede distinction. Scandinavian languages don't have a terminology to distinguish between nationality and the ethnicity of the majority population. In Denmark we sometimes discuss if we can create a new word for ethnic Danes like Danlænder etc. (I would prefer Daner, the original tribal name), but it just sounds awkward and artificial.

"Söder had said in a newspaper interview it would be a problem if there were too many people in Sweden “who belong to other nations” and had non-Swedish identities. Paying immigrants to go home would also help to avoid “foreign enclaves” and instead “create a society with a common identity”, he said."

This is more problematic, but his potential voters would support ethnic homogeneity as long as it was culturally defined and not biologically (there aren't that many actual racists in Sweden). It could get problematic for them if he mixed fully accepted minorities like Jews and Sami into those "of other Nations", but I doubt he actuallly did that.

What Björn Söder was actually saying was that SD has 3 definitions of being "swedish":

1: A person with swedish citizenship which anyone in the world can acquire just by getting a residence permit and living in Sweden for 5 years. A somali who barely speaks any Swedish and considers Swedish culture, norms and values to be alien would be under this category.

2. Being a person with ethnic Swedish background

3. Being a culturally Swedish person (A non-ethic Swede who has assimilated into swedish society) and left behind the culture of his homeland to fully embrace the swedish language, culture, values and cultural norms.

The Sweden Democrats goal is to strongly decrease the 1st category by stopping immigration from nonwestern countries, encourage immigrants to assimilate into swedish society, offering incentives for non-assimilated swedish citizens to go back to their homelands and strongly discourage multicultural policies.

According to Björn Söder Swedens 5 historical minorities (jews,sami, swedish roma, finns, tornedal finns) would be exempt from demands for assimilation and would be allowed to keep their culture and heritage.

All of this of course has not been discussed at all in Sweden, instead most of the discussion has been around the fact that the liberal newspaper Dagens Nyheter has twisted Björn Söders statement so that people think that the main jist of his argument is that Jews and Sami aren't swedes (and therefore not good people) when the actual main point of his argument was the fact that immigrants needed to start to conform more to swedish society. So most of the discussion for the last 2 days has been about the fact that Björn Söder is an evil nazi who hates jews and sami.

There isn't and has never been a common name for neither the subjects of the old Oldenburg conglomerate monarchy, nor the modern Community of the Realm.

Generally subjects of conglomerate states didn't have common names, there were no Habsburgians etc.

Some people have asked me i think the greens will decrease in this election and here's my theory:


My main argument why MP (The Greens) will probably go back in the elections is because a lot of the problems the Löfven-government have been having in government is because the Greens have had a very disproportional amount of power. The Greens have been demanding the closure of nuclear power plants, Bromma airport, new building of a very important motorway in Stockholm (förbifart Stockholm) and have blocked any attempt by the Social Democrats to limit labour migration which the unions have wanted for a long time. There have been a lot of scandals surrounding Green ministers such as Åsa Romson painting her boat with poisonous paint, Mehmet Kaplan comparing swedish ISIS-fighters to Swedes who volunteered to defend Finland against the soviets during WW2 and so on.

Charismatic former Social Democrat prime minister Göran Persson was interviewed in a lengthy interview on SVT where he destroyed the Greens completely and called their policies "pubescent trophy politics" and said that the problem with trophy politics is that it can easily be conquered by opponents and that the Greens were dragging his party down. The Greens are usually overrepresented in polls and if you combine that with the fact that a lot of the next election will probably be about who is most competent to govern in such a precarious situation i see realistic green voters migrating to the party most capable of governing within the red bloc.

Early signs of this phenomena can already be seen in the recent Novus-poll. The Greens unlike the Social Democrats are not a rich party who have support from the unions. A second election so close to the last one will deplete their coffers completely and if you combine that with the loss of idealism and anti-establishment credentials that comes from being a government party, things are not looking bright for the Swedish greens.

LOL

Don't deny your love for Göran! :D

That's basicly correct, but it was a little more complex, while it was said that Denmark-Norway was made up of three nations; Danes, Holsteiner and Norwegian (include Icelanders, Faroese and Greenlanders, the last because people at the time believed they was descendent of the lost Norse settlers, they had changed colour because they had become pagans :p). Sometimes they instead talked about two different ethnic groups Nordics and Germans.

But at the same time the term Danes was developing into a catch all for all the European subjects of the Oldenburg possessions. Of course the rise of German nationalism in Holstein in the 1820-30ties slowed down that process, but it was only after 1864, that Danish really took its modern national-ethnic character. If Denmark had survived as a multi-ethnic Danish-German state, we would likely talk about Dano-Germans and Dano-Scandinavians today, to distinct between the two groups.

He may be charismatic for Swedes, but it really doesn't translate well, at least not into Danish.

Göran has a way of dominating the conversation completely without raising his voice, he has massive amounts of confidence bordering on arrogance which some people might find off-putting but i personally find very reassuring.

Boarding? :P I do think a lot of people would argue that the "boarding on" should not be in front of the "arrogance" part. ;)   

Anyway Göran Persson has had a huge up-swing in popularity post-premiership in Sweden. Both among the left and the right funnily enough. The Left because they see him as a competent and strong leader capable of winning elections, something they haven't had since him, and the right because he was a rather right-wing and fiscally responsible Social Democrat who doesn't mind calling out the Left Party and the Greens.

A boost of popularity once a politician is out of office is however nothing unusual. Everything is better viewed through nostalgic glasses. But it should be remembered that one of the major factors of the centre-left loss in 2006 was how sick the general public was of Göran Persson and especially his arrogance.

I should mention that I despised the man with a passion back in '06, but I'm one of those who've come around to him in later years, when he's removed far from power and is only brought out to deliver one-line zingers to his own party and their support troops. ;)   

Sweden’s two govt parties and Left Party ally would get 44.1% of votes if election held today vs 40.8% for four-party opposition in Dagens Nyheter/Ipsos poll.

Social Democrats, Green Party and Left Party backed by 44.1% vs 43.6% in Sept. 14 election; four-party opposition supported by 40.8% vs 39.4%

Social Democrats of PM Stefan Loefven backed by 32% vs 31% in election, Green Party by 6.7% vs 6.9%, Left Party by 5.4% vs 5.7%

Opposition Moderates backed by 26.3% vs 23.3%, Liberal Party by 5.6% vs 5.4%, Center Party by 5.1% vs 6.1%, Christian Democrats by 3.9% vs 4.6%

Sweden Democrats  backed by 12.5% vs 12.9%

Ipsos poll of 1,403 people was conducted from Dec. 8-15

Considering Ipsos last poll before the September election gave the centre-left 52,1%... I consider this very good news.  ;)

Ipsos chef opinion analyst admitted in DNs article about their poll that they hadn't changed their polling methods since the last elections to compensate for the underestimation of SD as Yougov and Novus have. No serious person can believe that SD has had 12,5% support 3 months in a row as Ipsos claims.

For the record, I read both the interview with Söder and the follow-up interview with him in Aftonbladet where he defends himself and the man is a nasty piece of work. If I was wearing a kippa and met him in a dark alley I'd be scared for my life.

Saying his words were twisted is odd when he got to read the interview before publishing and validated what was said. When defending himself he repeats the statement that Jews aren't Swedes.

These guys give me the shivers. :/

According to Expressen the election is called off after the government and the Alliance have agreed on a budget. Press briefing at 10.30 am local time today (in half an hour).

http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/klart-det-blir-inget-extra-val/

And it is confirmed by Stefan Löfven. What an anticlimax.

http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/lofven-bekraftar-det-blir-inget-extra-val/

So basically Sweden is now governed by a grand coalition in all but name.

Strong far-right party, utterly hapless Social Democrats, chronic ungovernability and snap elections... It's official: Sweden has now turned into Denmark.

Denmark is far from ungovernable and besides the 2007 election we haven't had a genuinely early election since 1990. 1994, 1998, 2001, 2005, 2011 and the coming one in 2015 were/are all basically full term elections with the PM sometimes trying to take advantage of a situation and calling it half a year early.

Well OK, 1970s Denmark. :P

I was shocked when the early elections were called. I was even more shocked when they were called off. But this is a relief for 7 out of 9 parties, so we should be happy.

Apart from SD which one is the second non-relieved party? V?

I was thinking about FI. This was their second chance getting into Parliament. When 2018 rolls around there's a serious risk they've fallen into oblivion once more. 

Good.

The only thing that would have come out of this election: stronger SD and another stalemate.

Also, the parties probably realized that another campaign just after a major election would hurt their party finances and literally leave them broke for the next years (especially the smaller parties).

The more important thing will be now if the "government" can pass anything important in the next years (and with whom), or if it will fall apart at just a later point once again ... :P

Well the deal struck between the Government and the Alliance is that they will not obstruct the government's budget. (Meaning the government will be able to raise taxes and so on)

They will also have broad bipartisan negotiations on Pensions, Defense, and Energy between the six parties.

There are also a few minor policy changes that the government might have good realistic chances of passing with the help of jumping majorities, but a lot of their policies will still be wing-clipped.   

Good, that's better than the alternative. Let the SD stay on the sidelines, even if it means that they get stronger. Maybe they somehow self-destruct themselves at some point down the road.

I thought about them, but then I figured that a double failure (which all the polls indicated) would kill them outright, while this cancellation gives them time to build up a national organization. Still, I suppose they're doomed anyway.

Well it doesn't make a big difference, SD will continue to grow and it's interesting to see when it reach the size, where they can't be ignored anymore.

So is Sweden becoming more and more like Austria where the major parties end up forming perpetual grand coalitions to keep out the neo-nazi racist party?

It is no secret the two of us have greatly differing opinions and ideological viewpoints on this issue Ingemann, but I will try to answer this as objectively as I can.   

If you ask me, they're already at the size were they can't be ignored. Everything that has happened politically in this country since the election has happened because of the Sweden Democrats. There hasn't been a single news story about politics since September that wasn't about the other parties' relation to them, how to handle them, or in any other way linked to the Sweden Democrats. The only political issue that is on the agenda today is immigration, even if the seven other parties tries to pretend otherwise. SD makes the political weather. That is not being ignored, and that is not being with-out influence. 

Now I understand, that what you mean is: how much more do the party grow before there has to be political concessions to them on immigration policy?   

The thing you have to understand, in order to understand why no party has been willing to rethink their immigration position to align themselves closer to SD is that in all parties there are people who really and truly believe SD are complete Nazis, and if you give them the finger, it is only a matter of time before we are handing out stars and pink triangles to people. (http://nyheter24.se/maktkamp24/785296-5-otacka-fakta-som-visar-likheterna-mellan-sverige-i-dag-och-tyskland-pa-30-talet) Any sort of nearing towards the Sweden Democrats in their mind, is seen as equal to the parties in Weimar Germany allowing Hitler to take power.

While there are several politicians in at least five out of the seven other parliamentary parties who would openly or secretly welcome a similar development to Denmark, there are as many in the parties who would rather leave their party than stand any form of nearing to the Sweden Democrats because of this.

This means that a party would not only have to have a leadership that themselves are willing to take a Danish approach, they also have to be willing to split their own party in the process, and risk that their former coalition partners flee them. The benefit of the position change does in other words have to be great enough to weigh up huge internal fighting and negative press.     

I am sure you will think it is stupid. (You usually don't have very high regards of Swedish intelligence) But that is how it is viewed over on this side of Öresund, and that is the reason that the Swedish political elite treats this issue the way they do, and why there won't be any change in position in the near future. 




Well as I'm sure you can understand DL, it is either going the Austrian way, or the Danish way. 

The Austrian Way on this issue includes the large conservative party being in government with the right wing populists for five years after which there is a split between fundis and moderates in the right wing populist party and the moderates subsequently wither away. So it is the result of a quite specific set of circumstances and not likely to repeat itself.

Sweden has a different party system with a far more fragmented centre-right than Austria and they lack anything close to the Kronen Zeitung to legitimize bigotry of all sorts (on the contrary even the popular Swedish press is quite PC). So Austria is not an apt comparison. SD is unlikely to grow to a similar strength and you lack the "we have tried working with these people and they are useless" experience on the centre-right.

1. I imagine this segment must be quite small in Folkpartiet. How is the status in Centre?

2. KD seems already to have begun adjusting their immigration policy in a tougher direction.

3. At the end of the day the party that matters is the Moderates. If Sweden were to follow a  "Danish way"  (or even a "Norwegian way" with a shared government) SD and M could do it without the two small liberal parties and under the right circumstances also without KD.

So it is the internal dynamics in M that will be decisive, incl. whether the party is prepared to dump their Social Liberal option(s) (as the Liberals in Denmark dropped theirs). It is worth remembering that you risk handing over "free" coalition partners to the SocDems if you take that road as a Conservative party. The Danish Liberals did it in a situation where two of our three centrist parties were already "dead" (or dying in the case of KrF/KD).
The fact that the small Swedish centre-right parties are quite right wing on economics at the moment may make this less risky.

Kronen Zeitung, not Kronenberger Zeitung.

Or just "Krone".

But otherwise you are right with your analysis.

When I say the Austrian way, I mean it as a simplified way of saying broad cooperation from left and right. I am of course aware of the fact that it isn't entirely correct historically as Austria (together with Italy) was the first Western European country to open up to a so called populist xenophobic party, even before Denmark. Just as when I say the Denmark way, that is only a simplified way of saying the other parties adapting to and including the party.

   

Folkpartiet is an odd party. It might be a correct analysis that the segment is smaller in FP, historically they have been the most pro-immigration party on the right, and despite the fact that Venstre is their official Danish sister party, when you look at their historic base and roots they're much more closely aligned to Radikale, which of course tells you something. But they were also flirting with the idea of stricter immigration policies in the early 2000's, and it was the FP mayor of Landskrona (now a Member of Parliament) who first neared SD on the local level, so it isn't entirely sure that it is smaller.

I could write an entire novel on the divisions on this issue within my own party, heck I could probably write a book just around my own local party club's division, but I'll leave it at the fact that such a section exist, and are in certain local councils very influential. But this is the party that two years ago was saying they might want completely free immigration so it isn't we that will take the leap.

The Moderates probably has the largest section, and while the similar sections in C, FP, and S who work very discretely, there are several people in the party openly calling for the Moderates to take that direction. That being said, between Reinfeldt and Anna Kinberg Batra the national leadership is dead-set against it.

KD is the obvious candidate. They're a Conservative party with Conservative values (make of that what you wish) and they desperately need a winning profile issue, and in difference to M, C, and FP their youth-wing isn't against the idea, quite the opposite Christian Democratic Youth could actually be described as the cheerleaders of such a development. Still even if they were to take the plunge... it's KD, their influence and the grand scale of things is well...   
 

The Liberal People's Party is traditionally the most pro-immigrant?

I'm sure I remember about a decade ago the BBC was lumping them in with the National Front and Pim Fortuyn because they supposedly questioned immigration. Although the comparison itself was obviously sensationalist I imagine there was at least a little truth to the Liberals taking on the immigration issue.

If you'd read the entire section, you'd have had the answer. 

What is the majority view in Sweden with regards to immigration? In most countries the pressure for immigration restrictions isn't only due to far-right party strength, but also to the fact that most of the right-wing electorate shares their view of this topic. Maybe the reason why right-wing parties haven't aligned with the SD is because their base wouldn't necessarily follow them?

There was an opinion poll on the topic in May by SIFO which gave the following (http://www.svt.se/nyheter/val2014/fler-tycker-sverige-tar-emot-for-manga):

44% - Immigration is too high.
36% - Immigration is at a good level as is.
10% - Immigration is too low. 

Actually Radikale started as a strange alliance of the sort of people that founded Folkpartiet with the poorest part of the Centre basis. No Swedish party resembles Venstre in any meaningful way.

Too bad you did not feel like breaking down the internal division in Centre on immigration. I would be very interested in that.

Thinking about it, the Kronen Zeitung's popularity is probably because of their A4-format while all the other major & more in-depth newspapers (such as the Standard, Presse, Kurier, Wr. Zeitung, SN, etc.) all use the more reader-unfriendly and huge A3-format. Maybe if the other newspapers would switch to A4 format, they would get more readers too. Now, the Krone has 3 Mio. daily readers (every 2nd Austrian voter), while other newspapers are well below 1 Mio. daily readers.

That doesn't explain the Krone's populism and bigotry of course.

I find the idea of Sweden's cancelling an election very amusing.

Did SAP basically win this budget negotiation against the Alliance?

Looking at the in-campaign polling figures, SD was very strong, but not strong enough to support one of the two large parties on its own. They needed a small party to join, too. So two parties would have to defect to immigration-control policies at the same time. On the other hand, neither SAP+MP nor Alliance could form a government without massive compromises, and a grand coalition would make much more sense. Furthermore, SAP and SD were the most influential parties: Any government required support from one of them. So the natural outcome would be SAP+M.


The British broadsheet press tried this (except The Telegraph); circulation continued to fall. My theory is that broadsheet readers have desk jobs and were earlier adapters of online news, whereas the tabloids sell better to people in manual jobs and homemakers, where idle web-browsing time is more limited. So, the popular newspapers remain popular.

Speaking of Austrian-way or Danish-way, you can also be on track for the French-way : far-right fascist-ish party that nobody except a few right-wing hawks wants to work with eventually finds the voters to grow to first place and win local elections on its own.

Not sure about national ones, be it France or Sweden.