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Sweden’s spring budget survives crucial vote

UPDATED: After a series of setbacks Sweden's centre-left coalition has got its budget approved, thanks to a controversial cross-party deal that followed last year's government crisis.

Published: 17 June 2015 08:43 CEST
Sweden's spring budget survives crucial vote
Sweden's Social Democrat Finance Minister, Magdalena Andersson. Photo: Fredrik Persson/TT

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Most of the members of the centre-right Alliance opposition stuck by their promise to abstain in order to allow the Social Democrat-Green spring budget go through in Tuesday's vote.

The budget will allow the coalition to implement more of its centre-left policies.

Since the end of last year, Stefan Löfven's government has been following the Alliance's financial plan, following a political crisis in Sweden. This policy emerged after a complex December deal, designed to minimize the nationalist Sweden Democrats' influence in parliament after the party stoked the chaos by voting with the centre-right parties to block the government's original budget.

But the agreement also paved the way for Prime Minister Stefan Löfven's top team to make amendments to the budget this spring and to ensure its next budget proposal gets passed in the autumn.

READ MORE: What is the December Agreement?

Only a couple of opposition Moderate Party politicians – Finn Bengtsson and Anders Hansson – refused to follow the Alliance's line and voted against the centre-left budget on Tuesday.

Bengtsson called the December Agreement an “unholy pact” and said he could not bring himself to support left-wing policies.

But despite internal disagreement within the opposition, experts predict the controversial deal will survive in the coming months thanks toTuesday's vote.

“Given where the pieces are now, I think the December Agreement will last. I think it will grow ever-stronger as time passes, because the next election will come closer. Nobody will want to meddle with it then. Especially not [Moderate leader] Anna Kinberg Batra, if there's a hope to grow stronger than the centre-left and reclaim government power,” politicial scientist Mikael Sundström of Lund University told Swedish newswire TT.

His counterpart at Umeå University, Torbjörn Bergman, added that the alternatives to the December Agreement are too unpalatable for any of the parties to consider.

“None of them want to negotiate with the Sweden Democrats and the Alliance has no reason to try to topple the government and form its own,” he told TT.

READ MORE: How did the Sweden Democrats go mainstream?

Some of the budget reforms announced earlier this year, and approved in Tuesday's vote include more workers in the elderly care sector, creating new places in higher education and adult training, railway maintenance and raised unemployment benefits.

Social Democratic politics professor Ulf Bjereld, based at Gothenburg University, told The Local in April: “If you want to summarize it, it's a fairly traditional Social Democratic – and of course now Green as well – budget where you care for the welfare, by raising for example the cap on unemployment benefits and employing more workers in the elderly care sector. It's a symbolic 'reset budget' to bring back the social safety net of the last century.”

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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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