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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Politics in Sweden: What is being done to cut the cost of living?

Here's the roundup of the week in Swedish politics, in the latest edition of The Local's Politics in Sweden column.

Politics in Sweden: What is being done to cut the cost of living?
Swedish Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson. Photo: Ali Lorestani/TT

Sweden’s Social Democrat-led opposition has been turning up their rhetoric in pushing the government for tougher action on the country’s rapidly rising inflation and cost of living.

Inflation now stands at 12 percent according to the Consumer Price Index (and 9.4 percent without taking the effect of fluctuating mortgage rates into account – you hear both figures in the political debate, but the latter is what the Central Bank – the Riksbank – uses).

Food is 21 percent more expensive than this time last year, which is the biggest yearly rise since the start of the 1950s, eclipsing even the high-inflation years of the 1970s.

The Social Democrats are now calling for parliament to debate the high cost of living.

“The government appears not to have realised the scope of the crisis and is not acting, so we have to discuss it in parliament,” Swedish news agency TT quoted the Social Democrats’ finance spokesperson, Mikael Damberg, as saying just the other day.

So what is the government doing?

The latest move by Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson is to call Sweden’s food giants to a meeting.

The Swedish grocery market is dominated by three main players: Ica, Axfood and Coop, with Ica owning around 50 percent of the market. This means that it’s easier for them to raise prices than it would be in a market with more competition from other companies.

“My message [to them] will be: how can we keep prices down, how should the price escalation be quelled, and to talk and make sure that none of these companies exploit the situation to raise prices,” Svantesson said, warning of “unnecessary” and “unacceptable” price increases.

The government has previously introduced an energy subsidy to help households with high electricity bills (the first batch of which was sent out to households in southern Sweden in the past few weeks) and lowered the price of fuel for vehicles (which has had limited impact at the pump).

It has not paused an amortisation requirement for mortgage holders, an election pledge which it had to pull back on after criticism from senior authorities.

In France, the government earlier this month created agreements with supermarkets to set lower prices on a number of everyday goods. The three-month scheme involves supermarkets applying special discounts and agreeing to take a cut in profits.

Calls have been made for Sweden to do the same thing, but it seems unlikely. Erik Thedéen, the new head of the Riksbank, dismissed the idea when asked by reporters, and John Hassler, a Stockholm University economist, also criticised such a move, saying it did not work when Sweden tried to combat high inflation in the 1980s.

The government also seems reluctant to roll out further support for households at this stage, with Svantesson telling TT that from her perspective, her main role at the moment is to “carry out responsible economic policy that doesn’t fuel inflation”.

You should, however, expect the Riksbank (which makes its decisions independently of the government) to raise Sweden’s key interest rate by up to half a percentage unit at its next meeting in April. This would set the rate at around 3.25-3.50 percent.

The Riksbank’s goal is to get inflation down to its target of two percent, but raising the interest rate could also have knock-on effects for households – at least property owners – if banks then feel that they have to raise the interest rate on mortgages.

On a positive note, as far as money goes, we’re heading into the summer months, so people won’t have to pay as much for heating their homes.

In other news

The Botkyrka politician whose supporters claimed was this year ousted due to gang infiltration has been beaten once again to the post of group leader of the local Social Democrats in a new vote. Ebba Östlin, the former mayor of Botkyrka, lost a vote on who should be the group leader of the local Social Democrats to her rival Emanuel Ksiazkiewicz, with only 80 votes to his 121. 

The local party had been in chaos since January, when Östlin lost a no-confidence vote of members, and resigned as mayor a few weeks later. After the vote, her supporters complained she had been the victim of a coup, and that people with known criminal connections had infiltrated the party in order to oust her. An internal investigation by the Social Democrats found no hard evidence to support the claim.

What’s next?

The Swedish parliament is expected to on Wednesday this week vote on the bill that would see lawmakers formally approve Sweden’s decision to join Nato.

The bill is expected to be voted through without any hiccups, although Turkey is still blocking the path to Nato membership.

Politics in Sweden is a weekly column by Editor Emma Löfgren looking at the big talking points and issues in Swedish politics. Members of The Local Sweden can sign up to receive an email alert when the column is published. 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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