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ELECTION

Have Sweden’s politicians totally lost their sense of direction?

With Sweden's election year of politicking picking up speed following the holidays, liberal commentator Nima Sanandaji looks at whether the country's politicians have forgotten the difference between right and left.

Published: 14 January 2014 15:50 CET
Have Sweden's politicians totally lost their sense of direction?
Do we really do live in a time when it's hard to distinguish right from left? File photo: Monica Arellano-Ongpin

Jonas Sjöstedt, leader of Sweden's Left Party (Vänsterpartiet), recently said that his party knows “the difference between right and left”. This remark, made during the opening speech of the party’s convention, was clearly aimed at Social Democrat leader Stefan Löfven who a few months ago proclaimed: "I find the concept of right and left so difficult; I don’t think anybody can define what is right and what is left."

No one doubts that the Left Party, which evolved out of Sweden's own Communist party, knows the difference between right and left. After all, the party's programme still explains that as “socialism realizes the human right to control one’s own work, the ownership of means of production will be repealed altogether”. In virtually all issues, the Left Party stays true to its name, taking stands to the left of all other parliamentary parties in Sweden.

Sjöstedt is, quite cleverly, trying to ride on the left-wing wave in Swedish politics by attracting left-leaning Social Democrat voters. Löfven, on the other hand, knows too well that one of the main obstacles for him to becoming Sweden's prime minister after the September elections is that many centrist voters are repelled by the radical ideas of the Left Party. With that in mind, the Social Democrat party leader is attempting to move his party to the center of the Swedish political spectrum. Löfven is signaling that he would like to co-operate with center-right parties like the Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) rather than the Left Party.

The quotes by Sjöstedt and Löfven are interesting because they tell us much about how the parties are maneuvering in hopes of optimizing future electoral success. But the quotes are also a sign of how it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish left from right in Sweden's political landscape today – at least when it comes to slimming down the size of central government administration.

Recently, the Social Democrats promised to cut the scope of the Swedish central government by 10 billion kronor ($1.5 billion). This move is smart, since it is about giving voters what they desire.

Public opinion surveys conducted in 1997, 2002, and 2010 paint a clear picture of Swedes' attitudes toward government and municipal administration. Six out of ten voters want to reduce the tax money aimed at these parts of the public sector, whilst merely three percent want to see an increase. It is also smart since it attracts the attention of voters with liberal, free-market sympathies who are particularly sceptical of government waste. Sweden's Social Democrats can, for example, point to the fact that their party colleagues, the Danish Social Democrats, are already working to slim Danish government agencies.

Of course, cutting down the size of government was a promise made by the parties of Sweden's governing centre-right Alliance coalition way back in 2006. And as liberal author Henrik RS Olsson has shown in a book published in late 2012, the government has indeed cut the number of agencies somewhat since coming to power.

But the government has also created new agencies, and expanded existing ones. The end result is that Sweden's central government has actually expanded both in terms of the number of employees and operating costs. As the newspaper Barometern recently wrote, today Sweden has anywhere between 245 to 468 government agencies, depending on how you count.

By promising to slim down central government, the Social Democrats are blurring out what is right and left on the Swedish spectrum. And the centre-right Moderates find it difficult to react to Löfven's new move. Moderate MP Anna Kindberg Batra, head of the Riksdag's Committee on Finance, criticized the idea by saying: “Ten billion is a lot of money. It can have consequences for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of public employees and lead to some agencies having to shut down”.

So, the leading left-leaning party aims for reducing the scope of government bureaucracy, whilst the leading right-leaning party opposes the same idea. We really do live in a time when right is difficult to distinguish from left. 

Dr. Nima Sanandaji, a Swedish writer of Kurdish origin, has written numerous books and reports about policy issues in Sweden. He is a regular contributor to The Local.

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POLITICS

‘Very little debate’ on consequences of Sweden’s crime and migration clampdown

Sweden’s political leaders are putting the population’s well-being at risk by moving the country in a more authoritarian direction, according to a recent report.

Published: 29 April 2024 08:56 CEST
'Very little debate' on consequences of Sweden's crime and migration clampdown

The Liberties Rule of Law report shows Sweden backsliding across more areas than any other of the 19 European Union member states monitored, fuelling concerns that the country risks breaching its international human rights obligations, the report says.

“We’ve seen this regression in other countries for a number of years, such as Poland and Hungary, but now we see it also in countries like Sweden,” says John Stauffer, legal director of the human rights organisation Civil Rights Defenders, which co-authored the Swedish section of the report.

The report, compiled by independent civil liberties groups, examines six common challenges facing European Union member states.

Sweden is shown to be regressing in five of these areas: the justice system, media environment, checks and balances, enabling framework for civil society and systemic human rights issues.

The only area where Sweden has not regressed since 2022 is in its anti-corruption framework, where there has been no movement in either a positive or negative direction.

Source: Liberties Rule of Law report

As politicians scramble to combat an escalation in gang crime, laws are being rushed through with too little consideration for basic rights, according to Civil Rights Defenders.

Stauffer cites Sweden’s new stop-and-search zones as a case in point. From April 25th, police in Sweden can temporarily declare any area a “security zone” if there is deemed to be a risk of shootings or explosive attacks stemming from gang conflicts.

Once an area has received this designation, police will be able to search people and cars in the area without any concrete suspicion.

“This is definitely a piece of legislation where we see that it’s problematic from a human rights perspective,” says Stauffer, adding that it “will result in ethnic profiling and discrimination”.

Civil Rights Defenders sought to prevent the new law and will try to challenge it in the courts once it comes into force, Stauffer tells The Local in an interview for the Sweden in Focus Extra podcast. 

He also notes that victims of racial discrimination at the hands of the Swedish authorities had very little chance of getting a fair hearing as actions by the police or judiciary are “not even covered by the Discrimination Act”.

READ ALSO: ‘Civil rights groups in Sweden can fight this government’s repressive proposals’

Stauffer also expresses concerns that an ongoing migration clampdown risks splitting Sweden into a sort of A and B team, where “the government limits access to rights based on your legal basis for being in the country”.

The report says the government’s migration policies take a “divisive ‘us vs them’ approach, which threatens to increase rather than reduce existing social inequalities and exclude certain groups from becoming part of society”.

Proposals such as the introduction of a requirement for civil servants to report undocumented migrants to the authorities would increase societal mistrust and ultimately weaken the rule of law in Sweden, the report says.

The lack of opposition to the kind of surveillance measures that might previously have sparked an outcry is a major concern, says Stauffer.

Politicians’ consistent depiction of Sweden as a country in crisis “affects the public and creates support for these harsh measures”, says Stauffer. “And there is very little talk and debate about the negative consequences.”

Hear John Stauffer from Civil Rights Defender discuss the Liberties Rule of Law report in the The Local’s Sweden in Focus Extra podcast for Membership+ subscribers.

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