The Big Bad Swedish Politics & News Thread

[Lord Halifax]

So after an entire day of bickering and the Centre, Liberal and Christian Democratic parties going out and saying that they will not follow the Moderates' lead and be open to negotiating with the Sweden Democrats in the Riksdag, Anna Kinberg Batra held a press conference basically just saying that the Moderates are sticking by what she said on Thursday.

I though KD was to the right of the Moderates, and closer to SD on immigration?

[Lord Halifax]

People angry at the moderates for opening up to SD, it would seem.

The rise of the party actually started long before the Moderates' flirt with SD. That just accelerated the trend. Centre leader Annie Lööf has had very good approval numbers since the 2014 election (yes, the same Annie Lööf that used to be as popular as the plague).

The party has done a good job reconnecting with its rural base, talking a lot about the division between cities and rural areas, attacking the government for not doing enough for rural areas while at the same time cooperating with them to implement some good policies such a moving government jobs from Stockholm to smaller towns and cities.

At the same time the party finally seems to be making inroads in the cities (especially Stockholm) thanks to its immigration and economic policies. They have gained from liberal-minded Greens and centrists Moderates who're both disappointed with their old parties.

I'd reckon the numbers also has a fair bit to do with voters who generally dislike both the Conservative right in M/SD and our incompetent Red-Green government. Similarly to how the LibDems used to win folks who hated both Tories and Labour simply by being neither.

And the Liberals aren't seen as a credible alternative by these folks?

[Lord Halifax]

Also, there is now some kind of scandal regarding many of the top Social Democrat ministers regarding the leak of confidential information, which could perhaps hurt their poll numbers further.

https://www.ft.com/content/d9e15fe4-7051-11e7-aca6-c6bd07df1a3c

Behind paywall

[Lord Halifax]

Supposing that the Alliance do push Löfven out (although I suppose that is getting less likely by the day) - would the Moderates still be expected to lead the coalition?

Surely Annie Löof wouldn't be too happy at being a junior coalition partner to a party the Centre are currently polling ahead of? And wouldn't Centre be worried about losing support if they did go into being a junior government partner?

I haven't seen any polls with C ahead of M.

[Lord Halifax]

I wonder how a prolonged S-C partnership on the national level will impact the party in the North. Especially in those places like Vindeln and Robertsfors where C have been the main opposition party to S and pretty much see them as sworn enemies.

Could M pick up some C defectors in the North? I know there are significant cultural differences, but they still seem like the most obvious alternative.

[Lord Halifax]

But again, I'm not exactly sure WHY Västerbotten continues to give below-average numbers for the SAP compared to the rest of northern Sweden, especially that one little valley district on the Norwegian border that loves smaller parties.

It's Storuman, where Evangelical free churches (some pretty hardcore) used to dominate (and they still have a lot of congregations for such a small place) and a significant Sami population (Sami is official minority language in the municipality). It has lost a lot of population since then and the SAP is doing okay now (32%+ in 2018), but being rural without any industry and evangelical would generally make it a bad SAP area back in the day. Evangelicals used to vote Liberal in Sweden and it fits the pattern with it being a KD stronghold in 1991 (where nearly all the other KD first places are in the Småland bible belt).

Swedish skiing legends Ingemar Stenmark and Anja Pärson are from that area btw.

[Lord Halifax]

So, with L having at least announced to switch back to M+KD, can they expect to be kept alive by some Moderate voters or rather not?

Tactical voting for a party polling at 1.5 to 2 percentage points below the threshold seems pointless, it's more likely that some L voters will vote M to avoid wasting their vote.

[Lord Halifax]

Well that was fun.

Magdalena Andersson was elected Sweden's first female PM with the mandate of forming a coalition government between the Social Democrats and the Greens. Seven hours or so later she hands in her resignation to the Speaker, asking to be put before a new vote in the Riksdag, with a mandate to form a Social Democratic minority government.

Does she need to really do this? Can't she just sack the Green ministers and replace them with Social Democratic ministers?

Not if she was "elected with the mandate of forming a coalition government between the Social Democrats and the Greens".