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It’s crunch time for Swedish politics: What will happen on Wednesday?

Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson has been nominated as Sweden's new prime minister. Her fate will be decided in a vote in parliament on Wednesday at 9am – but what does this mean for Swedish politics?

It's crunch time for Swedish politics: What will happen on Wednesday?
Left Party leader Nooshi Dadgostar, whose party could put an end to Magdalena Andersson's prime ministerial bid. Photo: Jonas Ekströmer/TT 

Does this mean Andersson is going to be Sweden’s new prime minister?

Not necessarily. The nomination just means that her prime ministerial bid will be put to a vote by parliament, and it is not yet clear if her nomination will pass on Wednesday.

Under Sweden’s system of negative parliamentarianism, a prime ministerial candidate needs only to convince a majority of members of parliament not to vote against them in order to take power. But with the slim margins in the current Swedish parliament, that is not actually a safe guarantee.

Andersson needs to win the votes or abstentions of both the Centre Party’s 31 MPs and the Left Party’s 28 MPs. Together with the government coalition parties’ 100 Social Democrat MPs and 16 Green Party MPs, this would bring her to the magic majority of 175 mandates (the right-wing parties have 174). 

READ MORE: Magdalena Andersson nominated as Sweden’s new prime minister

What needs to happen for her to win?

Andersson has already achieved the support of the Centre Party, as well as the government coalition parties – the Social Democrats and the Green Party. This means that the only barrier between her and the prime ministerial post are the Left Party’s 28 members of parliament.

She has not yet achieved support from the Left Party despite ten days of negotiations, meaning that – if the party’s MPs choose to vote against her instead of voting for her or abstaining – she will lose the vote.

The Left Party wants more generous pensions, so Andersson may have to reach an agreement on this topic to secure the party’s votes.

What are the chances that the Left Party vote against her?

Andersson has previously warned the Left Party’s leader, Nooshi Dadgostar, that if her party doesn’t back her candidacy, they will be enabling “the most right-wing conservative government Sweden has had in modern times”.

Senior Social Democrats, meanwhile, have questioned whether Dadgostar will be willing to stand in the way of history, and block Sweden’s first female prime minister. 

“Is Nooshi Dadgostar seriously considering stopping Sweden’s first female prime minister?” asked former foreign minister Margot Wallström in a post on Facebook in October.

This could be a miscalculation. 

Dadgostar showed herself willing to vote down a Social Democrat PM in June, and reaped substantial benefits from doing so. 

She could well be willing to do so again on Wednesday, whether the PM candidate is female or not.

Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson on her way to a press conference with speaker Anders Norlén. Photo: Jonas Ekströmer/TT

She might calculate that there is little risk of the Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson getting his own candidacy past parliament, meaning she can stall the process and thereby win concessions from the Social Democrats. 

Dadgostar also threatened in a press conference on Monday to vote against Andersson, if the two leaders haven’t come to an agreement before the prime ministerial vote.

“If the Left Party, for example, just waved Andersson through, then the Social Democrats might come to believe that it’s business as usual with that party and that they don’t need take too much notice of it. So it’s a very finely balanced bargaining situation,” Nicholas Aylott, associate professor at Södertörn University, told The Local earlier in November.

However, Andersson also needs to play it safe – if she makes too many concessions to the Left Party, the Centre Party could rebel and pull its tacit support.

What happens if Magdalena Andersson wins?

If Andersson wins, she will be Sweden’s new prime minister. She may be able to present a new government as early as Friday this week.

What happens if Magdalena Andersson loses?

If Andersson loses, there are a few different possibilities.

Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson may be offered the opportunity to put his own candidacy to a vote – which he would probably lose.

After this, assuming the Social Democrats make concessions to the Left Party, and gain its support, Andersson would most likely be nominated again – and would win, as long as the Centre Party accepts her concessions to the Left Party.

The speaker has four chances to nominate a new prime minister – so if neither Andersson nor Kristersson wins, and the situation remains blocked, there would be a snap general election.

Leader of the Moderate Party Ulf Kristersson may also have the chance to put his own prime ministerial candidacy to a vote if Andersson loses. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

What are the different options for a government?

One option is the return of a Social Democrat-Green government, which would rely on support from the Centre and Left Parties at a minimum to reach the required majority. This is the most likely scenario, although it is by no means definite that this will happen.

On the right of the political spectrum, a Moderate-Christian Democrat government could become a reality, possibly including the Liberal Party. With the support of the Liberal Party and the Sweden Democrats, they would be one vote short, but could take power with the support of just one or more other MPs going against the party line, and one Centre Party MP did just that in 2018.

Another option is a centrist coalition, which could see the Centre Party unite others from both sides of the coalition. The biggest obstacle to this reality is the reluctance of the Social Democrats and Moderates to work together. 

What else is happening on Wednesday?

In an unrelated vote, timetabled prior to news that Andersson’s prime ministerial candidacy would be tested on Wednesday morning, the government’s budget for 2022 will also be passed or rejected. This vote will take place at 4pm after the prime ministerial vote, meaning that parliament will already know whether Andersson’s bid has succeeded or failed.

This will undoubtedly be an extra element of stress for Andersson, who risks not only losing her prime ministerial candidacy, but also failing to pass her budget – which would be a major blow to the current finance minister.

SWEDISH BUDGET: Will the government be able to pass its proposals?

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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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