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POLITICS

How did the re-election change (or not) the political map of Falun?

Re-elections are rare in Sweden, but on Sunday the people of Falun went to the polls again. Here's how they voted.

How did the re-election change (or not) the political map of Falun?
Stefan Löfven and his wife Ulla canvassing for votes ahead of the Falun re-election. Photo: Ulf Palm/TT

In September's general election, votes cast by 145 people in the municipality were not included in the count after the bag containing them was delivered late, as The Local reported at the time.

The result of the municipal election was then appealed to the Swedish Election Review Board, which in February decided to call a re-election in Falun, taking place on Sunday, April 7th. Only the municipal election had to be re-done, since the board decided that the missing 145 votes would not have affected Sweden's parliamentary election nor the Dalarna regional election, all of which took place on the same day.

The vote was seen as the first big test for the political parties after the so-called January Deal (januariavtalet in Swedish – in which the Centre and Liberal parties agreed to allow their former centre-left rivals, the Social Democrats and Green Party, to govern in exchange for some influence on key policy areas) and even Prime Minister Stefan Löfven came to the town to campaign.

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But interest in the new election turned out to be comparatively low in Falun. When polling stations closed on Sunday evening, 59.9 percent of eligible voters had cast their ballot according to preliminary figures from the Swedish Election Authority, compared to 87 percent in the September vote.

“Turnout is traditionally lower when it's a re-election. The government formation debacle last autumn has also made people annoyed and fed up with this,” Håkan Hammar, chair of the local election board, told news agency TT, referring to Sweden's three months of government negotiations after the September 9th parliamentary election left the country divided.

Could Falun now be in for another period of post-election haggling? Since the September vote, the centre-right Centre Party, Moderates, Liberals, Christian Democrats and the Falu Party have been in power with the backing of the Left Party, and no bloc got its own majority in Sunday's vote either.

After 36 of 37 districts had been counted, the preliminary result on Monday morning saw the Left Party climb from 9.0 to 10.8 percent of the vote and get another two seats in the local parliament. The Centre Party and the Christian Democrats both claimed one more seat each, with the former increasing its support from 14.8 to 17.0 percent and the latter from 4.1 to 5.5 percent.

The Moderates meanwhile lost two seats and the Liberals and Falu Party one seat each, while the Social Democrats, Green Party and Sweden Democrats all remained at the same number of seats.

This means that although support has shifted within the current coalitions, the ruling alliance has in total held onto the same number of seats.

FOR MEMBERS: Who's who in Sweden's new government?

Sweden rarely has only one election taking place at a time, since elections at the parliamentary, regional, and local levels usually happen on the same day, partly in order to ensure high voter turnout.

And re-elections are rare in Sweden, with the most recent example apart from Falun taking place in Örebro eight years ago. Unlike in many other countries, Sweden does not carry out by-elections if an elected representative resigns, dies, or is otherwise prevented from carrying out their role.

But the Falun re-election was not without its stumbling blocks. The Liberal Party ordered 10,000 flyers ahead of Sunday's vote, and instead received 2,500 menus for a Dutch pizzeria after an apparent mix-up at the printer.

“We have no luck with the post. First there's a re-election because of Postnord and then we get these pizza menus,” Svante Parsjö Tegnér from the Liberals told the local Dalarnas Tidningar.

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

With the think tank linked to the Sweden Democrats openly recruiting the next generation of far-right social media 'influencers', why is Sweden so complacent about moves to shift public opinion to the radical right, asks The Local's Nordic editor Richard Orange.

OPINION: Is Sweden complacent about social media influence of the radical-right?

The radical right in Sweden is at least open about what it’s trying to do.

The homepage of Oikos, the think tank set up by Mattias Karlsson, the former right-hand man of Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, is currently recruiting the first 15 of “a new generation” of “conservative” online propagandists. 

The think tank – whose controlling foundation has been criticised for refusing to reveal the true origin of 5 million kronor in funding – this week launched its new Illustra Academy, which aims to train an army of young, far-right “creators” to help win over minds on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Successful applicants, it promises, will get the chance “to meet leading actors in social media and digital political influencing”.

They will get “mentorship from established political influencers”, build “valuable contacts with influencers, digital opinion-makers, creatives, politicians and possible future employers”, and meet “businesses, political organisations, communications agencies and media actors”. 

This programme is being set up by Andreas Palmlöv, one of the many top Sweden Democrats who went to the US after Donald Trump was elected president to work for an increasingly radicalised Republican Party, serving as an intern for the former Speaker of Congress Kevin McCarthy.

After his return to Sweden, Palmlöv was photographed meeting Gregg Keller, a US lobbyist he says he met through the Leadership Institute, an organisation backed by a who’s who of US billionaire donors which has over the past ten years spent 8 million kronor training up young “conservatives” in Europe.

Karlsson, Åkesson’s former right-hand man, has even closer links to the US, holding at least one meeting with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, and attending the wedding of the pro-Trump US conservative media profile Candace Owens in 2019.   

As a British citizen, I’m perhaps overly sensitive about the influence of conservative, libertarian donors and their think tanks, and of the efforts to use social media to push public opinion towards the radical right. 

Vote Leave, which led the campaign for the UK to leave the European Union, started its life at 55 Tufton Street, the townhouse near the UK Parliament where the country’s most powerful “dark money” think tanks are based, while Matthew Elliot, its chief executive, was a Tufton Street veteran. 

Since the UK left the EU, the ruling Conservative Party has been increasingly captured by these think tanks and their wealthy backers.   

Ministers, former ministers and Conservative MPs now happily speak alongside radical right figures at lavish conferences like the National Conservatism UK conference part-funded by Christian pro-Trump US foundations, or the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference part-funded by Paul Marshall and Christopher Chandler, the two billionaires who are the most open and prominent funders of attempts to shift the UK to the radical, libertarian right. 

Conservative MPs and former ministers have over the past two years been paid a total of £600,000 (8 million kronor) to appear on GB News, the Fox News clone jointly owned by Marshall and Chandler.

The Legatum Institute, Chandler’s own think tank, pretty much dictated the UK’s Brexit policy while Boris Johnson was prime minister, while during Liz Truss’s brief premiership, the Tufton Street think tanks supplied much of her team.

When her attempt to drive through their radical libertarian economic programme blew up spectacularly, she was forced to resign. But they haven’t given up, with Truss returning in February with the new Popular Conservatism group. 

I had always believed that the UK politics was immune to US levels of big donor influence, that the Conservative Party could never go the way of the Republican Party in the US, and it turns out I was wrong. 

So is that same naivety playing out in Sweden? 

The Oikos think tank has already started hosting international conservative conferences along the lines of ARC, with a conference at the Sundbyholms Slott castle outside Eskilstuna last year. 

When Social Democrat opposition leader Magdalena Andersson raised questions earlier this year about the funding of Henrik Jönsson, a popular YouTube debater, she was sharply criticised by commentators of both left and right for seeking to smear a critic without providing evidence

But in the US, there are billionaire-funded ‘educational’ YouTube channels like PragerU that follow a very similar format to Jönsson’s. Jönsson’s videos reliably follow the same talking points, questioning whether global warming is really causing extreme weather, spread disinformation about wind farms, call for Sweden’s public broadcasters to be abolished, and claim migrants have trashed the economy. 

And when a donor last year asked Gunnar Strömmer, now Sweden’s Justice Minister, how to give 350,000 kronor to the Moderates without having to identify himself under party financing laws, in part of a sting by TV4’s Kalla Fakta programme, Strömmer advised him to give it directly to right-wing “opinion-makers”, meaning, presumably, people like Jönsson. 

Despite the uproar, Jönsson has never explicitly denied receiving funding from outside organisations, only that such funding does not influence his output. 

“I am quite open about the fact that I willingly take money from all decent organisations and private individuals,” he told the Dagens ETC newspaper, while declining to give any further details. “But no one controls what I say,” he added. 

He has admitted that the website for his Energiupproret campaign, which blamed green policy and the shutdown of nuclear power stations for high power prices in the run-up to the 2022 election, was built by Näringslivets Mediaservice, a right wing social media outfit the precise funding of which was always unclear, although it was linked to Stiftelsen Svenskt Näringsliv, a foundation set up partly by the Confederation of Swedish Industry. 

The founders of Oikos’ new influencer education programme would probably argue that nothing is stopping the political left and centre from raising funds to train up young social media influencers in exactly the same way. 

Left-wing parties are not above taking donations. Approached by the same donor as part of the Kalla Fakta undercover report, representatives of the centre-left Social Democrats – as well as the Christian Democrats, Liberals, and Sweden Democrats on the right – also recommended ways around party finance laws.

But do we really want the UK or Sweden to follow the path the US has taken in recent decades, where a handful of billionaires with radical right opinions have aggressively pumped money into think tanks and media outfits and so succeeded in pushing one of the main parties towards previously fringe political opinions? 

It didn’t need to be this way.

When Sweden was developing its new party financing laws back in 2016, experts warned the then government must not to allow the identity of donors to be hidden behind foundations, the key method used by so-called dark money in the US, but the loophole was left open by the law.

It’s not just Oikos, which is funded by an opaque foundation, Insamlingsstiftelsen för Svensk Konservatism (The Fundraising Foundation for Swedish Conservatism), which uses this loophole. 

When caught in the sting by the Kalla Fakta programme, a Social Democrat also suggested that the donor set up a foundation to hide their identity. 

It may be that money from US billionaires, big companies, or indeed from other states, is not yet being spent in Sweden in a way that can alter the political landscape, but because neither think tanks nor influencers need to give much information about who funds them, it’s impossible to know. 

In the UK, the danger may soon be averted. No one seems to take the new outfit fronted by Liz Truss too seriously, and the general election later this year should offer the chance to clean up the country’s politics.  

Nonetheless, I feel like I’ve come very close to losing my original homeland to the kind of political developments seen in the US. I don’t want to lose my adopted country too.

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