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Sweden’s election is being misreported abroad – and this is a problem

Bad foreign reporting on Sweden's election risks giving readers around the world a false impression of the state of the country, argues The Local's co-founder James Savage.

Sweden's election is being misreported abroad – and this is a problem
Election posters in Stockholm. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

On Sunday I will cover my fourth Swedish election night for The Local. The contrast with the first one in 2006 could not be greater.

Then, the Social Democrats were set to be swept away by a newly-unified centre right after a 12-year unbroken spell in power. Their 70-year status as the star around which the rest of Swedish politics orbited was at an end. 

A significant election, but the rest of the world mostly looked on and shrugged. In London, a few Guardian columnists mourned, but not much more than that. 

What a difference a decade makes. The rise of the Sweden Democrats – and the obvious parallels to Trump, Le Pen and Brexit – means the attention focused on Sweden is out of all proportion to the country's size. Yet the decline of the foreign correspondent means that few media companies employ journalists who know anything about Sweden, let alone live here or speak the language. 

Imagine a journalist covering a US election who arrived in Washington a week before, had paid no attention to US politics for the preceding four years and didn't speak English. You now have a picture of many of the foreign journalists covering Sweden.

Combine this with the pressure to chase clicks and the result is dire: simplistic, sensationalist journalism that is frequently just plain wrong.

Last month, a Newsweek report screamed that a “far-right, anti-Islam party could win a majority in upcoming elections”. The party in question is the Sweden Democrats – currently polling between 17 and 24 percent, so at least 25 points short of a majority. The headline was simply untrue, but the article is still up.

Likewise, the New York Times published an op-ed by a German journalist that claimed that the Sweden Democrats had 'conquered' Sweden. The piece, like so many others, goes on to paint a dystopian picture of Sweden that is at odds with the experience of most people living here. A few anecdotes about gang violence in the suburbs leave the reader with the false impression of a society in decay, a point made well by Stockholm-based American journalism professor Christian Christensen.

The author goes on to betray his weak grasp of Swedish politics by stating that the Sweden Democrats “might end up in government” on Sunday (something that is not even remotely likely). He adds that SD success “makes a coalition government between the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party unlikely” (a nonsensical statement), and then speculates that the Social Democrats and Moderate parties might split as a result of the election – something that nobody who has observed Swedish politics could possibly assert.

Not all the reporting is bad – some pieces, often by journalists who know Sweden well – are very perceptive and well-researched.

Unfortunately though, the poor examples are all too typical. Dire diagnoses of the state of Sweden permeate almost every article about the election. You expect this from hyper-partisan sites like Breitbart or state propaganda like Sputnik, but mainstream media outlets are repeating the same tropes. 

Yet amid all the talk of crime and immigration and societal collapse, readers are rarely told that Swedes are equally exercised by humdrum issues such as healthcare and schooling. They could easily miss that Swedish politicians have reached a broad consensus on a restrictive migration policy and on the need for criminal justice reforms. They could also be forgiven for not realizing that much Sweden Democrat support is caused as much by economic factors and regions that have lost their sense of purpose as it is by immigration. Most importantly, they could be forgiven for not realizing that while there's a chance the next government will do a deal with the Sweden Democrats to get its budget through, it will almost certainly not include Sweden Democrat ministers.

There's no doubt that this is an extraordinary election in Sweden: politicians' handling of the 2015 migrant crisis was disastrous. They looked helpless in the face of gang crime, shootings and arson attacks in some areas. They also underestimated the number of Swedes who were natural cultural conservatives sceptical of globalization, feminism and climate change. Politicians here are worried that a high score for the Sweden Democrats will make forming a government hard. But foreign media currently reporting here are presenting a picture of Sweden that exaggerates the problems and misrepresents the facts – and this does their readers a disservice.

Member comments

  1. I’m not sure why the author thinks it is “nonsensical” to suggest that the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party might have problems forming a coalition or that “nobody who has observed Swedish politics could possibly assert” that the Social Democrats and the Moderate party might split. That’s almost exactly what last week’s article on this topic in The Local argues. (See August 28 article by a Swedish political scientist, “What Sort of Government Might Sweden Have After the Election”)

  2. Foreign journalists are not too far off the mark when they suggest a right wing movement in Sweden – up to a quarter of the voting population might vote SD!!! However, two examples in Europe make this tricky to predict what the actual vote will be. First the Austrian re-vote reversal which elected a far right candidate and second the French vote which on the day changed Le Pen’s pre-election rise into a damaging loss for her party. Assuming no other party want to pair with the SD and they get 18% (current poll of polls estimate) the S+M estimate of 41% (same poll of polls) will have 50% of all the remaining party seats giving a viable minority government but with some risk of losing battles if the remaining parties close ranks on some issues. Not sure if my ‘non-Swedish’ views make sense so happy to hear alternative scenarios. Btw I am not a Swedish citizen and although having lived here and paid taxes for 14 years I have no right to vote in the general election. So much for equality…

  3. From my US perspective the NYTimes Bittner piece was clearly labeled as opinion, not coverage of the election. Calling this misreporting is grossly inaccurate. The problem as I see it is lack of reporting and an excess of opinion.

  4. You mean like the Swedish media never reports that crime rate has risen exponentially since they started letting in mass amounts of immigrants?

  5. Hi John,

    First I would like to remind you that The Local was started by immigrants for immigrants, so please remember to be courteous. We do not accept comments that paint groups of people with the same brush and sound like they are implying that our readers are criminals.

    Secondly, here are some facts about crime in Sweden:

    In 2017, around 1.5 million crimes were reported to the police (that includes everything from petty offences to serious crimes), or around 15,000 per 100,000 citizens (fewer than in 2015). If you go back ten years, it’s 1.3 million in 2007 or 14,300 per 100,000 citizens. If you go back another ten years, to 1997, around 1.19 million crimes were reported or 13,500 per 100,000 citizens. Reported crimes have been on a steady, but not exponential, increase since 1975. Source: http://www.bra.se

    Looking at deadly violence, this is at around the same level as that of the early 1990s. In the years 2010-2014 on average 80 people a year were the victims of deadly violence, compared to 95 people a year in 2000-2004 and 107 a year in 1990-1994. Last year, the figure was 113, but in the past two decades the population of Sweden has increased from fewer than 8.9 million to more than 10 million, so deadly crime actually affects a smaller proportion of the population today.

    The Local has written quite a lot about this, for example here: https://www.thelocal.se/20180327/swedens-lethal-violence-stats-for-2017-detailed

    Thanks for commenting,
    Emma Löfgren, Editor, The Local Sweden

  6. Sure I will totally believe you when you say gun violence and drug trafficking are done by ethnic swedes. (Note the sarcasm)

  7. By the way, did they ever find out who burnt all those cars in Gothenburg? Or is that one of the things the Swedish media choose not to report?

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EUROPEAN UNION

Should Sweden abandon a weak krona for the euro?

With the 20th anniversary of Sweden's euro referendum this month, the weak krona has revived the long dormant debate over Swedish membership. We look at why joining the single currency looks more attractive today.

Should Sweden abandon a weak krona for the euro?

The krona hitting rock bottom has reawakened a debate that had been dead for twenty years.

Hedge fund manager Christer Gardell kickstarted the debate before the New Year, when he said Sweden should abandon the krona, which was now “a shitty little currency”. In January, the Moderate Party grandee Gunnar Hökmark, chief of the Frivärld think-tank and long-term euro advocate, argued that Sweden should join.

Veteran economist Lars Calmfors, who chaired the government inquiry which in 1999 recommended that Sweden stay outside, made a similar call shortly afterwards. Carl Hammer, chief strategist at SEB, who had voted against joining in the 2003 referendum wrote in May that he, too, was now “leaning towards a ‘yes'” on euro membership. 

Now one of Sweden’s three government parties has started to campaign on the issue. The Liberal Party, long in theory in favour of euro membership, on September 4th called for a new government inquiry on joining the currency. 

“We can quite simply no longer afford to stay outside [the euro],” the party’s leader Johan Pehrson wrote in the Aftonbladet newspaper. “Let’s upgrade our EU membership from ‘basic’ to ‘premium’. Let’s bring in the euro now!'” 

Is it a hot topic? 

According to Calmfors and Hammer, the debate is raging in the circles they move in, but has yet to really spread to the general public. 

“Between 2010 and the end of last year, I don’t think I was asked even once to speak about Sweden and the euro. But now I have two or three invitations each week, and in fact six this week when we are approaching the 20th anniversary of the referendum.” 

“I see a lot of academic and business seminars on the weak krona,” Hammer agreed.

For both of them, the revival in interest has come about mainly due to the weakness of the krona, which Calmfors complained had been trading as if Sweden were a “banana republic”. And unlike during the 1999 internet crash or the 2007 financial crisis, when a drop in the krona helped bolster Sweden’s economy, this time the weak currency was causing problems. 

“Earlier it has benefitted us,” Calmfors said. “The krona depreciated and firms could gain market share. It helped stabilise output and employment,” he explained. “But this time, it’s different. Now, the depreciation of the krona counteracts the efforts of the Riksbank to get inflation down and reduce aggregate demand. So this time, it is a problem.” 

For Hammer, the weakness of the krona was more understandable, reflecting a flight to strong currencies in reaction to the war in Ukraine.

“Had we not had Ukraine, and had we not had other global issues, I think the krona would have been stronger,” he said.

Calmfors isn’t so certain about this, pointing out that the Swiss Franc, another small floating currency, has not been similarly weak. He does, however, see the invasion of Ukrainian as the second big reason why the euro debate has revived. 

“The war in Ukraine has made Swedes recalibrate our view of our position in the world,” he said. “The application for Nato membership is the most obvious evidence for this, but I think it spills over to the euro issue as well.”

Lars Calmfors, Professor Emeritus in Economics at Stockholm University. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

HOW HAVE THE FUNDAMENTALS CHANGED? 

1. Sweden’s government finances are much stronger

While the weak krona is the catalyst for the debate, for Calmfors, the improvement in Sweden’s government finances is a much better reason for sceptics to change their minds. 

When he submitted his report in 1999, his committee’s main argument against joining was the risk of a country-specific economic shock which would affect Sweden, but not other EU countries. Such a shock would be hard to combat if Sweden no longer had the freedom to set its own interest rates or devalue its currency. 

“We argued that (…) it’s good to have your own monetary policy, an exchange rate that can change,” he said. 

At that time, Sweden’s national debt was at 70-75 percent of GDP, well above the 60 percent that is the (increasingly theoretical) maximum for countries signed up to the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact.

“This was very important in the 1990s, because we had a sovereign debt crisis in Sweden, so fiscal policy could not be used as a substitute for monetary policy,” he remembered. 

Now, Sweden’s national debt is just 35 percent of GDP, well below that of France at 98 percent or Germany at 60 percent and, for Calmfors, this removes the biggest obstacle to joining, as Sweden’s government would be able to spend its way out of any country-specific shock.

“That’s very low in an international context, so we have a lot of fiscal firepower. No one would argue with us if we had an expansionary fiscal policy.” 

Hammer, arguing along the same lines, pointed out that in the years before and since the euro referendum, Sweden had never in fact suffered the sort of country-specific shock that Calmfors and his committee had worried about. The Riksbank, meanwhile, had always run a monetary policy in line with that of the European Central Bank. 

“For the past 30 years, Sweden has been living with a floating exchange rate but living as if we’ve had a fixed exchange rate,” he said. 

The country, he explained, had had strict limitations on government spending, a surplus target, a very coordinated and orderly wage bargaining process, and a fully funded pension system. “So if any country would have the room and possibility to live with a fixed exchange rate, it’s Sweden.”  

2. Businesses don’t use the krona anyway 

For Hammer, the biggest new argument against the krona is not so much improved government finances as the fact that Sweden’s big companies now barely use it.

And the same goes for Sweden’s pension funds.

“Large corporations don’t want to deal in the krona – they prefer to make transactions and trade in euros and dollars – and we channel a huge part of our surplus or excess savings into foreign asset markets,” he said. “So, we’ve already to some extent adopted foreign currencies, but we’ve also kept the krona, which from my perspective makes the arguments for having it less strong.”

It is this which has pushed him towards a “yes” despite continuing to believe that the euro is “a suboptimal currency union”.  

“I’m leaning towards voting yes if we were to have a new referendum on the basis that the foundation for the currency has been undermined by the fact that we’re so dependent on foreign currency,” he said. “From that perspective, I think, you can make a case for joining the euro on the grounds of greater financial stability.” 

3. After Brexit Sweden looks more and more alone

With the UK leaving the European Union altogether, Croatia joining the euro this year, Bulgaria scheduled to join in 2025, and Romania in 2026, the number of countries who are in the EU but not the eurozone is falling. 

“If you ask people, like Swedish commissioners in the EU or people that have been doing negotiations in in the EU, they have the view that we have lost out by not belonging to the core,” Calmfors said. “The risk that we will lose out probably becomes bigger, the greater the share of EU countries that adopt the euro.”

Carl Hammer, chief strategist at Sweden’s SEB Bank. Photo: SEB

WHAT ARE THE STRONGEST ARGUMENTS NOT TO JOIN?

1. The risk of country-specific shocks is real 

Just because Sweden has more fiscal firepower to deal with a country specific shock does not mean the risk of such shocks is not a major drawback to euro membership. 

Finland suffered one when Nokia, far and away the country’s biggest company, mismanaged its reaction to the launch of the iPhone and exited to the mobile phone business. Between 2008 and 2022 its debt to GDP ratio more than doubled from 33 percent to 74 percent. 

Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal arguably suffered from the issue during the European banking crisis.

As Sweden’s economy is unusually sensitive to interest rates, with much higher private debt and a high share of variable rate mortgages, the ECB could easily set an interest rate that, while right for most eurozone countries, would be too high for Sweden. 

“That could be a problem, but it’s also a problem that could be dealt with by using fiscal policy,” Calmfors argues. 

2. The risk of bank bailouts and country bailouts remains 

The other big argument against joining the euro, which was clearly demonstrated during the European debt crisis from 2009 until about 2014, is that Sweden would have to help bail out countries, such as Italy and Greece, which have been less disciplined in the management of their government finances. 

Joining the euro would also mean joining the European Banking Union, which means that Sweden might also have to participate in rescuing banks in countries with less well-functioning financial supervision.

Calmfors acknowledged that this was still a risk, but argued that members of the European Union who are not part of the eurozone were increasingly being asked to contribute to rescue packages anyway. 

“If you look at the support after the Covid crisis and during the Covid crisis, we had to pay that as well, even though we were not a member of the monetary union,” he said. 

And when it came to bank bailouts, Sweden was, he argued, as likely to benefit as to lose out, given the high indebtedness of Sweden’s citizens. 

“We might end up having to pay for bank crises in other countries. But on the other hand, we would also be helped if we had a financial crisis, which of course is not something we can rule out,” he said. 

Also, he said there might be an advantage in having banks and other financial services regulated by the European Central Bank and other European regulators, as a European regulator might have more expertise, there are many cross-border links between banks, and there would be less of a risk of a cosy relationship building up between local banks and the regulator.   

HOW HAVE THE ADVANTAGES OF EURO MEMBERSHIP CHANGED?

Calmfors argues that while the negative risks of adopting the euro have diminished, the advantages remain more or less the same. 

“The biggest benefit is of course that having different currencies is a kind of trade impediment and that would be eliminated, which would mean more trade, which would mean that we use our resources more efficiently, so it would give slightly higher growth over a long period, which, even if small each year, would accumulate to quite a lot in the long term.” 

Recent research suggested, he added, that this effect might be more significant than people previously thought. 

“Studies seem to point to much bigger effects than we expected in the 1990s. We’re talking about a 10 to 20 percent increase in trade, not from one year to another, but over a number of years,” he said. 

The problem with the debate over euro membership had always been, he concluded, that the benefits and risks were of such a different character. 

“You can’t really make an economic calculation, because you are comparing different things: We are comparing small, but certain positive gains – because there will be more trade that we will get slowly over years – with a risk of big macroeconomic shocks that can have huge effects over a few years.”

This makes it hard for economists to reach a firm conclusion. 

“You can’t really say what is right and wrong, but I think what you can say is that the balance has shifted in the direction of being a more positive calculation for being a member today than there was 25 years ago.” 

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