SWEDEN IS facing a period of uncertainty after a general election that has shifted the country’s political spectrum towards the right and highlighted the decline of left-leaning parties across much of Europe in the wake of the financial crisis.
Prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt looked sure to remain in power for a second term after his centre-right alliance inflicted a crushing defeat on the opposition Red-Green coalition, whose main party, the Social Democrats, received its lowest support for nearly a century.
But a breakthrough by the far-right Sweden Democrats deprived Mr Reinfeldt of an outright majority and left a party rooted in the neo-Nazi movement holding the balance of power in parliament. The government now faces an unattractive choice between relying on the far right for help in passing legislation – something Mr Reinfeldt has vowed not to do – or turning to opposition parties for support.
Mr Reinfeldt said yesterday he would seek talks with the Green party in search of a working majority. A cool response from Green leaders indicated that Sweden could face days and possibly weeks of inter-party bargaining.
The re-election of a centre-right leader for the first time in modern Swedish history coupled with the entry of a far-right party into parliament represents a fundamental shift in the tectonic plates of Swedish politics.
"The alliance's victory marks the end of the Social Democrats' long dominance of Swedish politics," said the Dagens Nyheternewspaper. The latter party has ruled Sweden for all but 13 of the past 78 years.
Defeat for the Social Democrats showed how Europe’s left has struggled to capitalise on the economic turmoil of the past few years, with the Labour party recently ousted from power in the UK and Germany’s Social Democrats last year suffering their worst result in the federal republic’s 60-year history.
The spectre of a far-right party holding the balance of power in traditionally liberal Sweden provided a vivid symbol of rising far-right extremism in Europe, amid mounting debate on immigration.
Far-right representation is well established in countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium, but the absence until now of a strong anti-immigrant party in Sweden had burnished the country’s reputation as a bastion of liberal values.
Folke Johansson, political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, said: “The same ideas and views exist in Sweden as elsewhere, but they have been silenced by a political establishment that made it taboo to talk about the issue. This has been exploited by the Sweden Democrats.” Sweden’s shift to the right represents a challenge to the model of liberal multiculturalism and universal welfare espoused by the Social Democrats, the architects of the famed Scandinavian social welfare model.
Carl Melin, director of United Minds, a polling company, said the party’s biggest losses came among middle-class voters in the big cities of Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg and their suburbs.
“This was very much a personal victory for Fredrik Reinfeldt,” Mr Melin said. “Even if people didn’t like him, they trusted him more than Mona Sahlin [the Social Democratic leader] to run the government.”
A mild-mannered 45-year-old, Mr Reinfeldt has shifted his traditionally right-wing party towards the centre ground and persuaded voters that he wants to refine rather than dismantle Sweden’s cradle-to-grave welfare system. He has vowed further cuts to the famously high tax burden – focused on lower and middle-income workers – but promised they will be combined with increased investment in healthcare and education once the budget returns to surplus.
For all the talk of Sweden taking a shift to the right, Nicholas Aylott, political scientist at Sodertorn University near Stockholm, says Social Democrats can find consolation in the extent to which Mr Reinfeldt is committed to the status quo.
“The Social Democrats’ greatest triumph was to persuade the moderates that it was impossible to win elections in Sweden if you are perceived as threatening the welfare state.” – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)