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POLITICS

Five political crises in Sweden’s history and how they were resolved

Sweden's political landscape has changed significantly in recent years, leading to a situation where for the first time a sitting PM has been toppled in a no-confidence vote. But it's not the first time the country has experienced political turmoil, so we look back at previous crises, what caused them and how Sweden got through them.

Five political crises in Sweden's history and how they were resolved
What can we learn from history? We remember five times Swedish politics has faced, and overcome, a government crisis. Photo: Lars Hedberg/TT

1958: The last snap election

Elections outside the usual cycle (currently terms run for four years, but previously it was three) are extremely unusual in Sweden, and have happened in 1887, 1914 and 1958. 

The last time they took place, it was a row over pensions that prompted the early vote. At the time, Sweden had a bicameral parliament (the single chamber system with a total of 350 MPs would not be introduced until 1971).

The Social Democrats, then led by Tage Erlander in coalition with the Centre Party, had failed to get their proposed pensions reforms passed by parliament. Although the left-wing bloc had one more mandate than the right, at 116, one Social Democrat MP was absent on the day of the vote, leaving it neck-and-neck. The Centre Party was not happy with the Social Democrats’ plan to push through their reforms anyway, so left the government, but at this point did not choose to work with the right-of-centre parties.

So a snap election took place, with the result that the Social Democrats picked up an extra five seats, Erlander returned to power as head of a one-party government and completed his term until 1960.

1976: Nuclear power causes a rift 

After the 1976 election, a right-of-centre coalition made up of the Moderates, Centre Party, and the People’s Party (today the Liberals) took power, breaking 44 years of Social Democratic rule.

But there were internal divisions, and the one that proved to be decisive was nuclear power. Prime Minister and leader of the Centre Party Thorbjörn Fälldin wanted to stop the expansion of nuclear power, but his two partners disagreed. The reached a compromise whereby new plants could only be set up if there were clear plans on how to store nuclear waste, but when Fälldin saw that these rules were not stopping expansion, the disagreement ultimately led him to resign, and the People’s Party completed the government term as a single-party government. 

At the next election in 1979, Fälldin again took power and stayed in the role of PM for two terms, first with a three-party government with the Moderates and People’s Party, the second term in coalition only with the People’s Party.

1990: A break in the left-wing bloc

In the 1988 election, the Social Democrats won 45 percent of the votes, making it a minority government. Whereas today the Social Democrats govern in coalition with the Green Party (who actually entered parliament for the first time in 1988), back then the government relied on the support of the Left Party but did not include them in a coalition, meaning no Left Party MPs were government ministers.

In early 1990, Sweden was facing a financial crisis, so Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson announced a set of measures including wage freezes and a strike ban aimed at stopping inflation. The latter issue was a step too far for the Left Party and the day after Valentine’s Day, the relationship between the two left-wing parties broke down. The Left voted against the government’s proposals, which were defeated with a majority of 190 votes.

Ultimately, Carlsson returned as PM just a few weeks later and the Left Party agreed to support the government once again in return for some policy concessions, but it’s reasonable to argue that this split was a line in the sand, after which the Social Democrats could no longer count on the Left’s support.

2014: The December Agreement

1958 might be the last time a snap election took place, but one was called for March 2015, and only averted after a last-minute cross-party deal.

In September 2014, the Social Democrat-Green government took power, but as a minority government. This led to it struggling to get enough support for its own budget. In Sweden, opposition parties may put forward their own alternative policy proposals, which can be passed if they win a parliamentary majority. Historically, this has not been all that common because the government typically has the support of the majority. The difference in 2014 (and today) is largely due to the influence of the Sweden Democrats. In 2014, no party had wanted to cooperate with the far-right party to build a government reliant on their support, but they voted for the opposition’s budget rather than the government’s.

After the conservative budget was passed, Löfven called a snap election, but this was averted after talks over the Christmas period. The four centre-right parties, the Social Democrats and the Greens struck a deal to stop something similar happening again, agreeing to implement the opposition’s budget, but saying that in future, if it looked like a future government budget won’t get enough support, then the main opposition parties either wouldn’t vote for or wouldn’t put forward a rival budget. However, the agreement was called off just a few months later.

2018: A very close election and an uneasy alliance

Sweden’s September 2018 election was incredibly close, with just one mandate separating the right- and left-wing blocs and neither netting enough votes to gain a majority.

With eight parties represented in parliament, finding a compromise was tough, and it took four months of talks between the parties before any one prime ministerial candidate could gather enough support to take office.

This time, the crisis was solved temporarily through the January Agreement, a deal between the Social Democrat-Green government and two of their former opposition rivals, the Centre and Liberal parties. 

However, it’s up for debate whether we can say this crisis was truly resolved. It was an uneasy alliance, with the Left Party disappointed in the concessions the Social Democrats made to the right, and declaring from the outset that it would pursue a no-confidence motion if certain decisions were taken, particularly around employment rights and rental laws. In June 2021, the Left made good on that promise, voting with the right-wing opposition parties in a no-confidence vote that brought down the government and triggered the current crisis.

Editorial note: This article was amended on July 1st to reflect the fact that electoral cycles were previously three years, and that there were only three right-of-centre parties in parliament after the 1958 election. Thank you to member Richard for alerting us to the mistakes.

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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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