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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Politics in Sweden: Nato, a new poll and why a Swedish town is recounting its votes

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

Published: 6 March 2023 11:54 CET
Politics in Sweden: Nato, a new poll and why a Swedish town is recounting its votes
Hungarian parliamentarian Zsolt Németh (wearing glasses) on a visit to the Swedish parliament last week. He is set to visit again this week. Photo: Ali Lorestani/TT

Hungary’s Nato delegation in Sweden

A Hungarian delegation is in Stockholm this week to discuss Hungary’s outstanding approval of Sweden’s Nato application.

Turkey has been kicking up a storm for so long with their will-they-or-won’t-they ratification that we all seemed to forget for a while that there is one more country that has yet to accept Sweden as a member of Nato.

The delegation includes Zsolt Németh, chair of the Hungarian parliament’s foreign policy committee, deputy speaker Csaba Hende and two EU parliamentarians – all from Hungary’s ruling party Fidesz.

On Monday they were set to meet Swedish parliamentary speaker Andreas Norlén as well as Peter Hultqvist, chair of the defence committee, Aron Emilsson, chair of the foreign policy committee, and deputy speaker Kenneth G Forslund.

Hungary says it wants Sweden to join Nato and expects to ratify its application in a couple of weeks, but it’s clearly taking this opportunity to raise some issues they have with Sweden. Let’s just say the two countries have not had the warmest of relationships in recent years.

Németh said he wanted Sweden to show “more respect” towards Hungary when asked by Swedish news agency TT what he wanted to get out of this week’s talks. But he also added that he intended to vote yes to both Sweden’s and Finland’s Nato memberships.

We spoke about Hungary and Nato on the latest episode of The Local’s Sweden in Focus podcast – click here to listen.

New poll shows dwindling support for Sweden’s small parties

The Centre Party is polling at its lowest level in almost ten years, in a new summary of several recent opinion polls by Kantar Sifo on behalf of public radio broadcaster Ekot.

The party – whose new leader I wrote about last week – gets only 4.6 percent, but they’re not the worst off. The Liberals get 3.4 percent which means they would lose all their seats in parliament if an election were held today. The Christian Democrats get 4.0 percent, which puts them exactly at the threshold for getting into parliament.

The Social Democrats climb to 36.9 percent, followed by the Moderates at 19.7 percent and the Sweden Democrats at 18.2 percent. The centre-left opposition parties are polling at 53 percent altogether, while 45.3 percent still prefer the government and its coalition.

Swedish council to recount September votes

Laxå, a municipality of some 5,500 people in central Sweden, is recounting votes cast for its local authority in Sweden’s September election, after it turned out that a vote for a Green Party member had not been registered properly.

The vote would have given the candidate a substitute seat on the council, so the Election Authority ordered a recount.

The votes will be recounted at 9am on Tuesday at the County Administrative Board’s office in the city of Örebro. The count is, as all election vote counts are, open to the public.

Sweden Democrats: ‘Learn Swedish or lose your job’

As The Local reported last week, the far-right Sweden Democrats want staff working in the elderly care sector to be dismissed if they don’t speak Swedish, although they should get a year to learn Swedish during non-work hours and if they can pass a test after that they may keep their job.

That’s what they’re going to put to the government when it meets the three coalition parties to discuss an inquiry that will look into language requirements for care home staff, a Sweden Democrat spokesperson told TT.

The parties will need to agree on the details, so any final proposal as a result of the inquiry will not necessarily go as far as retroactively applying a language requirement.

Should TikTok be banned in the Swedish parliament?

The Centre Party wants the Swedish parliament to forbid members of parliament and other parliamentary staff to use Chinese-owned app TikTok, at least on their work devices, following criticism that the app may collect sensitive data from users.

The government offices in November urged its staff to delete the app. The EU parliament, the US, Denmark and Canada have all also introduced restrictions.

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

EXPLAINED: How radically does a new report aim to change Sweden’s public broadcasters?

Sweden's four-party government bloc has broken with the other parties in a parliamentary committee on public service broadcasting, adding what the opposition complains are "radically changed" proposals. How shocking are they?

Published: 14 May 2024 16:04 CEST
EXPLAINED: How radically does a new report aim to change Sweden's public broadcasters?

What is the Public Service inquiry? 

On the face of it, there is nothing particularly alarming about a parliamentary inquiry into the regulation and funding of Sweden’s three public service broadcasters: television broadcaster SVT, radio broadcaster SR, and UR, which provides educational programming. 

The committee, which included members from each party in parliament, was instructed to decide how the three broadcasters should be regulated between 2026 and 2033, its next remit period, and to make proposals which “create good conditions for public service organisations to maintain and protect their independence”. 

Similar parliamentary inquiries provided their conclusions in 2012, under the centre-right Alliance government, and in 2016 under the centre-left Social Democrat-Green Party government.

In his report, the inquiry’s chair, former Christian Democrat leader Göran Hägglund, said the committee supported the idea that the public broadcasters should still have a broad remit, and also that their independence should continue to be protected.

So why the controversy? 

The opposition parties are complaining that the committee, which started off working with cross-party consensus as its goal, had changed character at the last moment, with the three government parties and the far-right Sweden Democrats (together known as the Tidö parties after the palace where their collaboration started) suddenly pushing for the inclusion of previously undiscussed and radical changes. 

“Very late in the work on the inquiry, major differences have arisen as a consequence of the Tidö parties’ internal negotiations, which explains the many reservations and the alternative proposal for allocation of funds that our parties propose,” the committee members for the Social Democrats, Green Party, Centre Party, and Left Party, said in an opinion piece published in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.  

“We regret that the committee has not been able to unite behind the conclusions. At a late stage the Tidö parties chose to do their own thing, which is unusual. There has been a clear reluctance to look more widely for a solution,” the Social Democrats’ culture spokesperson, Lawen Redar, said at a press meeting.  

Perhaps the most controversial of the changes include: 

  • Stripping out a clause that requires the three broadcasters to ensure programmes reflect “equality” and “diversity”
  • Changing future funding so that the broadcasters get funding increased by just one percent annually between 2031-2033 
  • Proposing a new inquiry into fusing the three broadcasters into a single national broadcaster 
  • Pushing public service broadcasters to focus more on TV and radio, and less on the internet or social media

Is this a demolition of public service broadcasters? 

Well, not really. 

Sweden’s public service broadcasters have traditionally received an annual increase in funding of about 2 percent – in line with Sweden’s inflation target. This meant for a decade from 2010 until 2021, it saw a real rise in funding, but meant the broadcasters were hit hard by the inflation of over 8 percent in 2022 and nearly 6 percent in 2023, with many making layoffs. 

The inquiry recommends increasing funding, which was a combined 9.1 billion kronor in 2024, by 3 percent in 2026, 2 percent between 2027 and 2030 and one percent between 2031 and 2033.

Cilla Benkö, the chief executive of SR, said that the funding reduction represented “a gradual downgrading” of SR, which would mean “fewer journalists and fewer programmes”, especially after the organisation had just carried out a series of layoffs. 

“For eight years, we’re going to be short of 2 billion kronor, and we need to upgrade our property. We own Radiohuset in Stockholm, which is from the 60s, and we don’t have the money to do it. If we don’t get it, we will have to take money from journalism, which will affect the public and also affect civil defence.” 

In their reservation from the report’s conclusions, the Social Democrats wrote that they believed that the government’s decision to reduce funding was “ideologically motivated”. 

Is stripping out “equality” and “diversity” from programme goals a political move? 

In the report, Hägglund made out that removing jämställdhet, meaning equality, and mångfald, meaning diversity, from the description of what the three broadcasters’ programmes should reflect was simply because they were redundant.

Broadcasters, he argued, are already required to do this under the Public Service Act. 

But it’s clear that even if it might not have a large impact on the broadcaster’s output in practice, this fits in with the ideology of the far-right Sweden Democrats, for whom “diversity” and “ethnic diversity” in particular are not a fundamental part of “democratic principles”, as they have been seen within Sweden’s public broadcasters. 

Whether this will have real impact or just be something the Sweden Democrats can use to impress their voters remains to be seen. 

What about the inquiry into combining Sweden’s three broadcasters into a single entity? 

When he presented the inquiry Hägglund said that Sweden was “strange” in having separate national broadcasters for TV, radio and eduction. 

“We know that Sweden is strange in this respect. Nearly all counties have a single combined company,” he said at the press conference. 

The committee has proposed that the government launch an inquiry into combining the three companies into a single entity, a proposal that the members for the Social Democrats, Centre Party, Green Party and Left Party did not support.  

The wastefulness of running three separate public broadcasters is a longstanding criticism of Sweden’s system, however. 

Websites should only be “complementary” to TV and radio, and changes to social media guidelines

The inquiry held back from calling for the three public broadcasters to reduce or limit the amount of content they publish on their websites, but said that text media should be only “complementary” to their core TV and radio output.

The inquiry also said that the demand that broadcasters be “non-partisan” and “factual”, should also cover what they publish on social media, with all publications, including those on social media open for examination by Sweden’s broadcasting regulator. 

Finally, the inquiry said that the broadcasters’ own platforms should be their “priority distribution channels” on the internet, and that use of social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat should follow “an assessment of the risks and the potential consequences”. 

So what happens now?

The inquiry is now being sent out for consultation, after which it is likely to return to the parliament’s culture committee before a new bill is drafted and sent to parliament for a vote. 

The four centre-left parties who objected to many of the report’s conclusions have said they will continue working to get their positions into the final bill. However, as they don’t hold a majority in parliament, their leverage could be limited.

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