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SWEDEN ELECTS

Sweden Elects: New finance minister under fire after first long interview

In our weekly Sweden Elects newsletter, The Local's editor Emma Löfgren explains the key events to keep an eye on in Swedish politics this week.

Sweden Elects: New finance minister under fire after first long interview
Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson with her first government budget. Photo: Pontus Lundahl/TT

Hej,

Elisabeth Svantesson has given her first long interview as finance minister, speaking to the Svenska Dagbladet daily just days after she presented her first budget on behalf of Sweden’s new, right-wing government.

The government has already faced accusations of deprioritising the climate crisis, and Svantesson conceded in the interview that its planned investment in nuclear power (which is a low-emission source of energy, but takes time to develop, so it pays off only in the long run) would also make it difficult to reach Sweden’s climate targets within the next decade.

Asked what will happen if Sweden does not meet its Agenda 2030 target, the sustainable development targets agreed by the United Nations, by that year, she said: “It would mean that we don’t meet the targets. If we don’t we don’t, but our ambition is to steer towards that goal.”

That quote, which was perceived as far more laissez-faire than the situation warrants, was met with criticism from the opposition.

“I’m astounded at how you sign agreements and vote for legislation in parliament only to ignore it when you feel like it,” said Green Party leader Per Bolund.

The Social Democrats’ former finance minister Mikael Damberg gave a diplomatic-or-patronising answer (a school of conflict avoidance that can be perfected only by a party that’s more used to being in power than not being in power) and guessed that Svantesson had perhaps not meant it like that. “Svantesson has had a lot to do this week, maybe she’s tired.”

Speaking of interviews, one Swedish newsroom has not yet been getting them, at least not with senior ministers. One of public broadcaster SVT’s top political interviewers, Anders Holmberg, points out that all four right-wing party leaders and several ministers have declined to appear on his “30 minuter”, a show famous for putting hard-hitting questions to politicians and senior decision-makers. It’s of course not mandatory to say yes to all interviews even as a politician, but it’s an unusual move.

It’s interesting that Bolund tried to attack Svantesson specifically on not following through on commitments. This has been a recurring piece of criticism since the new government was elected two months ago.

The budget was more conservative (in this particular case I mean conservative as in cautious rather than as in right-wing) than you might have expected based on the government’s election pledges, and it’s not the only campaign promise that they’ve been forced to backtrack on.

“The central thing is that they’re breaking most of their major election promises at the same time as as they’re not really managing to take care of the big social problems Sweden faces today,” Damberg told SVT.

To be fair, you would kind of expect him to say this (when has a political opposition party ever praised the government’s budget?), but significantly, the criticism hasn’t only come from the left-wing opposition.

Moderate Party politicians in the powerful Skåne region earlier this month slammed their party for failing to deliver the promised support to those suffering sky high power bills in the southern Swedish county.

“There are effectively no reforms, and they’re not putting in place the policies they campaigned for in the election,” the head of the liberal think tank Timbro told the Aftonbladet newspaper about the budget.

It will be interesting to see whether the label as “promise breakers” sticks, and whether that will affect the right-wing parties in the next election.

Did you know?

Parties make more and more pledges during election campaigns. Ahead of the 2014 election, a whopping 1,848 vallöften (election promises) were made, according to research by Gothenburg University, up from 326 in 1994.

You may not believe this, because the stereotypical image of the dishonest politician perhaps unfairly endures, but research shows that most politicians keep most of their election promises most of the time.

Swedish parties in a single-party government and coalition governments with a joint manifesto tend to deliver on between 80 and 90 percent of their vallöften, according to political scientist Elin Naurin. For coalition governments without a joint manifesto, it ranges from 50 to 70 percent.

In other news

the deputy mayor of the town of Norrtälje, who got 15 seconds – technically 26 seconds – of fame after he was left speechless when a reporter asked him to defend hefty pay rises for top councillors has resigned, saying he wants to take responsibility for what happened.

He also told SVT about his long and very awkward silence on camera that his brain had simply blacked out after having worked for 13 hours straight and gone nine hours without food in the post-election frenzy.

Sweden Elects is a weekly column by Editor Emma Löfgren looking at the big talking points and issues after the Swedish election. Members of The Local Sweden can sign up to receive the column as a newsletter in their email inbox each week. Just click on this “newsletters” option or visit the menu bar.

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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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