Swedish election, 2018: Political Impasse, Löfven loses confidence vote

[DL]

The Jewish community in northern Umeå has closed down following serious threats by the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement. This means there is no Jewish community left in the northern 2/3rds of Sweden. The Jewish community laments the lack of concrete actions taken by local politicians to make sure no threats would be issued anymore.

Nordic Resistance has grown by a lot and spread like wildfire all over Sweden over the last few years. They sought to organize a march at a synagogue in Göteborg on Yom Kippur last year to intimidate Jews, but were banned from doing so.

Unfortunately, these days much of the "Jewish establishment" around the world has veered off to the far right and likes to turn a blind eye to ultra rightwing neo-Nazi anti-semitism (I mean who cares about the Nazis they only killed siox million of us) like this. They will spend 99.% of their time fretting about "anti-semitism on the left" and obsess over parsing every sentence uttered by Jeremy Corbyn, while ignoring these rightwing xenophobes. Look at how Netanyahu sucks up to anti-semitic xenophobes like Orban and Putin....

[DL]

Why are the Sweden Democrats so strong in Skane?

Also, it has always fascinated me how it is that Sweden may be one of the only countries in the industrialized world where the main metropolitan area (Stockholm) tends to be a bit of a right of centre stronghold. In almost every other country the main cities lean left compared to the rest of the country (e.g. London, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna etc... in Europe, but also Toronto, Montreal, vancouver, New York, LA, Chicago etc...)

[DL]

I would speculate that Stockholm would keep voting a bit more "right" than the rest of Sweden as long as the "right" consists of parties like the Moderates and Liberals who accept the small "l" liberal consensus among elite opinion (in other words as long as they are the Swedish equivalent of pro-EU Tories in the UK). If we get to a point where the parties of the right in Sweden start to become socially conservative and xenophobic and populist and Eurosceptic etc... then it could create a whole new cleavage and I wonder who would then start to win in Stockholm?

[DL]

I would speculate that Stockholm would keep voting a bit more "right" than the rest of Sweden as long as the "right" consists of parties like the Moderates and Liberals who accept the small "l" liberal consensus among elite opinion (in other words as long as they are the Swedish equivalent of pro-EU Tories in the UK). If we get to a point where the parties of the right in Sweden start to become socially conservative and xenophobic and populist and Eurosceptic etc... then it could create a whole new cleavage and I wonder who would then start to win in Stockholm?

If the Moderates took that path, the Liberals would by definition be the main beneficiaries, it seems to me.

...and if the main cleavage in Swedish politics moved from traditional left/right to more of an open/closed polarization...at what point would the Liberals and possibly the Centre Party split from the Moderates and there would be more of a shift towards a SAP/L/C centre left government that would isolate the SDs and Moderates

[DL]

The Centre Party and the Liberal Party seem so similar in Sweden. Why don’t they just merge? What issues actually set them apart?

[DL]

Any news on the final election results? Wan't today the day that the last votes from abroad etc... were supposed to tallied and added in?

[DL]

Expressen poll of 609 Moderate councillors and local party leaders. Should the party negotiate with SD if it's necessary to gain power? 324 (53%) says yes, 285 (47%) says no. So a narrow majority is opposed to the current party line. Polling of Moderate voters tend to show an even bigger share willing to cooperate with SD.

So if the Moderates did in fact start to negotiate with SD, what would happen A. to all those Moderate bigwigs who are totally opposed to any cooperation with SD? B. What happens to the Alliance between the M and the Liberals and Centre parties?

[DL]

I don't get Björklund at all. Joining a government with the Social Democrats seems like guaranteed electoral suicide for the party.

Why would that be? Its not exactly unheard of for small "l" liberal parties in Europe to ally themselves with social democrats in coalitions. In Denmark the small "l" liberal Radical party has a long history of participating in coalitions with the Social Democrats and in Norway the Centre party is always aligned with the Labour Party. In Germany it would not exactly be unheard of for the FDP to make a deal with the Social Democrats and in the UK no one would be shocked if the Lib Dems made a deal with Labour (maybe not with Corbyn but certainly if the party was led by a more mainstream figure). In the Netherlands the D66 typically backs PvdA led governments etc...

Maybe its about time that there was a new paradigm in Swedish politics whereby instead of the rigid Alliance vs Left blocks (complicated by the SDs) - we get something a bit more flexible and where people will vote C or L for different reasons than before. Maybe they want to get some influence within a S led coalition and there is a large enough block of voters who are socially liberal and would rather vote for a centrist party that will be a moderating influence on a S government than be a party that supports a hard-right M government that has a tacit arrangement with the neo-Nazis in the SD.

Sometimes for things to stay the same, things are going to have to change

[DL]

Hmm ...

Maybe it's finally time to stop ignoring the Sweden Democrats and start coalition talks with them.

You cannot ignore a major party forever. Someone needs to tell that to the Swedish mainstream parties, so they "get it".

That's what von Papen and Schliecher thought in Germany in 1933 and look how that turned out...

[DL]

The vast majority of Swedes voted for parties that completely reject working with the Sweden Democrats. So part of democracy is to respect that. If at some point over 50% of Swedes vote for the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats then they will have earned the right to govern. In the meantime, the other parties are under no obligation to work with them.

[DL]

This poll was released just under a week ago:
Social Democrats: 30.5% (+2.2)
Moderate: 19.2% (-0.6)
Sweden Democrats: 18.3% (+0.8 )
Centre: 8.6% (no change)
Left: 8.4% (+0.4)
Christian Democrats: 5.4% (-0.9)
Liberals: 4.3% (-1.2)
Greens: 4.0% (-0.4)

What if the Liberals and the Greens (and maybe even the Christian Democrats) fall under the 4% threshold?!

[DL]

Of course it goes without saying that even the most rightwing member of the Moderate Party would be a Bernie Sanders Democrat if he or she lived in the US!!

[DL]

Can someone explain why its so difficult for there to be a coalition in Sweden that brings together the centre left and centre right when these arrangements seem very routine in Finland and Norway? In Norway the Centre Party routinely forms coalitions with the Social Democrats and in Finaldn it is veryu common for there to be governments that bring together the Social Democrats and the Centre party and the NCC (whihc is the Finnish equivalent of the Moderates).