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Centre-right Alliance and Green Party to lead Stockholm council

The Green Party has agreed to work with the centre-right Alliance parties in Stockholm's city council, meaning a power shift in the Swedish capital.

Published: 12 October 2018 13:44 CEST

Centre-right Alliance and Green Party to lead Stockholm council

The group leaders of the Centre Party, Liberals, Christian Democrats, Moderates, and Green Party in Stockholm city council. Photo:

“We have chosen to enter into a green-blue cooperation,” said Anna König Jerlmyr, group leader for the Moderate Party in Stockholm. She said the decision was taken after “productive and intensive negotiations with the goal of finding a stable and long-term majority.”

The capital was previously run by a red-green-pink bloc, made up of the Social Democrats, Green Party, and Feminist Initiative, which lost its majority in the September 9th election.

September 9th saw Swedish citizens vote for their representatives at three levels of government: national, regional, and municipal. At the national level and at the local level in many areas, no bloc won a majority, leading to a period of negotiations made complicated by the high number of parties in Swedish politics (eight represented in parliament, with others active at the local level).

Two policies agreed on by the parties were that plans for a new flagship Apple store in the city centre will be stopped, and that Stockholm will not host the 2026 Winter Olympics, Dagens Nyheter reported.

“The discussion means that we will be able to carry out much of our election manifesto, and ensure that the Sweden Democrats are not given leverage in Stockholm,” said Green Party group leader Daniel Helldén at the press conference.

As in the parliamentary elections, the Stockholm city council elections left the two main blocs — the Alliance and the red-green-pink grouping — without a majority, with the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats the third largest group.

At the national level, deadlock continues. Moderates leader Ulf Kristersson has been asked by the speaker of parliament to try to form a government, but whether or not he will be successful and, if he is, which parties he will get support from, remains to be seen.

ANALYSIS: Who will govern Sweden? Eight possible coalition scenarios

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Business leaders: Work permit threshold 'has no place in Swedish labour model'

The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise said in its response to the government’s consultation, submitted on Thursday afternoon, that it not only opposed the proposal to raise the minimum salary for a work permit to Sweden’s median salary (currently 34,200 kronor a month), but also opposed plans to exempt some professions from the higher threshold.

“To place barriers in the way of talent recruitment by bringing in a highly political salary threshold in combination with labour market testing is going to worsen the conditions for Swedish enterprise in both the short and the long term, and risks leading to increased fraud and abuse,” the employer’s group said.

The group, which represents businesses across most of Sweden’s industries, has been critical of the plans to further raise the salary threshold for work permits from the start, with the organisation’s deputy director general, Karin Johansson, telling The Local this week that more than half of those affected by the higher threshold would be skilled graduate recruits Swedish businesses sorely need.

But the fact that it has not only rejected the higher salary threshold, but also the proposed system of exemptions, will nonetheless come as a blow to Sweden’s government, and particular the Moderate Party led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, which has long claimed to be the party of business.

The confederation complained that the model proposed in the conclusions of the government inquiry published in February would give the government and political parties a powerful new role in setting salary conditions, undermining the country’s treasured system of collective bargaining.

The proposal for the higher salary threshold, was, the confederation argued, “wrong in principle” and did “not belong in the Swedish labour market”.

“That the state should decide on the minimum salary for certain foreign employees is an unacceptable interference in the Swedish collective bargaining model, where the parties [unions and employers] weigh up various needs and interested in negotiations,” it wrote.

In addition, the confederation argued that the proposed system where the Sweden Public Employment Service and the Migration Agency draw up a list of exempted jobs, which would then be vetted by the government, signified the return of the old system of labour market testing which was abolished in 2008.

“The government agency-based labour market testing was scrapped because of it ineffectiveness, and because it was unreasonable that government agencies were given influence over company recruitment,” the confederation wrote.

“The system meant long handling times, arbitrariness, uncertainty for employers and employees, as well as an indirect union veto,” it added. “Nothing suggests it will work better this time.”

For a start, it said, the Public Employment Service’s list of professions was inexact and outdated, with only 179 professions listed, compared to 430 monitored by Statistics Sweden. This was particularly the case for new skilled roles within industries like battery manufacturing.

“New professions or smaller professions are not caught up by the classification system, which among other things is going to make it harder to recruit in sectors which are important for the green industrial transition,” the confederation warned.

Rather than implement the proposals outlined in the inquiry’s conclusions, it concluded, the government should instead begin work on a new national strategy for international recruitment.

“Sweden instead needs a national strategy aimed at creating better conditions for Swedish businesses to be able to attract, recruit and retain international competence.”

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