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KEY POINTS: Which election promises are missing from Sweden’s budget?

Lower taxes on work and savings, lower fuel prices and pausing rules on paying off mortgages. How many of the government's election promises have actually made it into their budget?

KEY POINTS: Which election promises are missing from Sweden's budget?
Sweden's finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson delivers her first budget. Photo: Maja Suslin/TT

Income tax cuts and lower taxes on pensions

Has it been implemented? Kind of.

During the election campaign, the Moderates promised income tax cuts and reduced taxes on pensions to the tune of 30 billion kronor. This hasn’t made it into 2023’s budget, other than the fact that income taxes for those over 65 who continue to work past retirement age will be cut, starting next year.

This tax cut for pensioners will affect around 400,000 people, giving a tax break of around 1,900 kronor per year for most, with a max cap of 6,000 kronor per year. It will cost the government 770 million kronor to implement.

Finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson was unable to say when income tax cuts would be implemented for other groups.

“We’ll have to get back to you on that, it depends on the financial situation, but the mandate period is long,” she told TT newswire.

There will be no changes to taxes on pensions.

Tax cuts on investment savings accounts

Has it been implemented? No.

Another Moderate Party election promise – which made it into the government’s coalition agreement with the Sweden Democrats – was to cut taxes on investment saving accounts (ISKs), so that savings of up to 300,000 kronor would not be taxed. This has not made it into this year’s budget.

“It’s important to be restrained in a very difficult situation so we don’t increase inflation,” she told TT newswire.

The budget states that “the government aims to propose lowered taxes on savings by making a basic level of 300,000 kronor on investment savings accounts tax-free during this mandate period”, which suggests that the policy hasn’t completely been scrapped, but will not be implemented in 2023.

According to finance magazine Privata Affärer, those with their savings in investment savings accounts can instead expect “sky-high taxes” on their ISK accounts next year, due to increased interest rates.

Their calculations suggest that those with savings of 300,000 kronor could expect to pay 2.5 times as much tax on their savings next year compared with this year, the highest level of taxes on ISK accounts since their introduction in 2012.

Lowered fuel prices

Has it been implemented? Kind of.

During the election campaign, the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Sweden Democrats promised to lower diesel and petrol prices by between 5 and 9 kronor per litre through lower taxes, lower VAT and lowering the reduction obligation to mix expensive biofuels with fossil fuels to make them more environmentally friendly.

Fuel prices will be lowered at the pump, but only by 14 öre for petrol and 41 öre for diesel. 

“I think it’s well-balanced,” Svantesson said. “We’re doing what we promised. The biggest difference for drivers will come in January 1st, 2024, when we lower the reduction obligation to the EU’s minimum level.”

This will cost the government 6.7 billion kronor in 2023, going up to 6.9 billion kronor per year in 2024 and 2025.

Pause on mortgage repayment requirements

Has it been implemented? No.

The governing Moderates and Christian Democrats, as well the Sweden Democrats, promised to pause current mortgage repayment requirements (amorteringskravet) prior to the election, proposing a similar system to that which was implemented during the pandemic when borrowers were only required to make interest payments rather than actively paying off their mortgages.

This is not included in the budget for 2023, as it is now considered to be contrary to the Riksbank’s (Central Bank’s) measures to combat inflation.

High-cost protection for energy prices

Has it been implemented? Kind of.

The Moderates promised to introduce a temporary high-cost protection scheme for winter 2022/23, which would consist of the government subsidising “a majority of the excess costs” if “the monthly price exceeds a certain level”, which would be determined by the market situation each month. They also stated that this scheme would be implemented by November 1st 2022.

This has somewhat been implemented, but not via the budget. Instead, the government has proposed an alternative energy subsidy system, which will comprise a one-off payment based on last year’s usage to users which have an energy agreement (nätavtal) on a certain date – most likely in November or December this year.

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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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