Right-wing Alliance inflicts defeat on Sweden’s social democrats

[Hannah Bell]

Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Sweden saw the right-wing Alliance achieve victory, with 49.3 percent of the vote and 172 seats. They fell just short of a majority, meaning that Prime Minister Frederick Reinfeldt will need support from outside his coalition.

The Social Democrats dropped to an historic low, with just over 30 percent of the vote. Although final results will not be available until Wednesday, when postal votes are counted, the decline represents the worst result for the Social Democrats since 1914. As an illustration of the sharp decline the traditional party of government has undergone, at the 2002 elections over 40 percent of voters backed the Social Democrats.

As a whole, the opposition Red-Green Alliance received the support of 43 percent of the vote, with the Greens support increasing slightly. Social Democrat leader Mona Sahlin summed up the sentiments of the opposition: “We had a bad election, a very bad election. We were unable to win back voter support”.

The vote for the Alliance was not an endorsement of its policies. Although the Moderates’ support rose to 30 percent, the other three parties fell back with the Christian Democrats, receiving less backing than the far right Sweden Democrats.

The result means that the right-wing has secured a second term in office for the first time in over 80 years, ending an era in which the Social Democrats dominated politics. The party’s decline reflects the end of a whole period in which it was possible to advance a perspective of national economic regulation coupled with a relatively generous welfare state. Since the 1990s, the Social Democrats have turned away from the defence of the welfare system and government intervention in the economy. Under the leadership of Göran Pärsson, who led the Social Democrats as prime minister until 2006, the welfare state was systematically undermined as the way was prepared for a vast privatisation of state-owned companies, which the Alliance launched on taking power.

The move of the Social Democrats to the right, replicated by social democratic parties internationally, brought a corresponding decline in its support amongst working people...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/swed-s22.shtml

[anaxarchos]

1. This is becoming a recurring story...

... as the article states. The traditional Social Democratic "cures" have used up most of the runway. Tax policy, social spending and economic intervention have gone to levels which now generate significant internal opposition. The counter-attack, for "increased international competitiveness", is becoming harder and harder to fend off. Radical measures are called for but none of these parties has the appetite for them. Instead, they drift further and further to the right, trying to sell "competence", or "intellect", or vague "change", or something else on which they have no monopoly whatever... while losing their historical base. They try to beat the drums of fear against what the right might bring in the future, while many of their present voters can no longer stomach the present. And thus, they bring about what they claim to abhor... incapable of going sufficiently back wards but obstinately refusing to go forward.

But, none of that has anything to do with American politics...

[LWolf]

2. The world is becoming more sociopathic by the day. nt

[seabeyond]

3. per this board, i thought sweden was utopia. well, all of europe anyway. nt