Right-wing bloc wins Swedish elections

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BrusselsReport.eu
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In Sweden, the left-wing bloc of Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson has suffered a defeat during the elections last Sunday, of which the results have just been finalized. As a result, the PM resigned yesterday. The right-wing bloc, composed of the Sweden Democrats (ECR), Moderates (EPP), Christian Democrats (EPP) and Liberals (Renew) secured 176 seats, which is three more than the bloc which backed the outgoing government.

“Our red line that we will not form a government together with the Sweden Democrats,”  Moderate MEP (EPP) Tomas Tobé stated in response, while he previously also pointed out that the SD, which obtained more votes than the Moderates, “has changed its policy.” “They are not against European or NATO membership”, he explained, thereby confirming his party’s willingness to work with SD in the Swedish legislative, citing immigration, economy or energy as areas of cooperation.

Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the Moderate party, is now about to become the new Prime Minister, despite the fact that his party lost ground.

In The Spectator, Swedish political commentator Paulina Neuding explains that the Sweden Democrats are “often described as ‘neo-fascist’ or ‘far right’. Their roots are indeed more problematic than those of many anti-establishment parties in Europe given that they sprang from a genuinely extremist movement. But their agenda now cannot be described as right-wing extremism. And they had one great advantage: for many years they were the only party to criticise Sweden’s immigration policy. It’s not racist, they insisted, to discuss what’s going wrong, and this is a view that was increasingly widely shared.

For the best part of a decade, as gang-related gun crime and grenade attacks escalated across Sweden, the SD had a near-monopoly on the hottest topic in the country. It’s no real surprise then that they are now Sweden’s second-biggest party with 21 per cent of the vote, the most successful movement of this sort in Europe.”

She points out SD may enter a supply and confidence agreement, but they are likely to remain a wary partner:

“And although they may now lend their votes to a Kristersson coalition, it’s far from certain that they want to help him govern. (…) For the first time, they would be held accountable by voters for all the things they rail against: the unchecked migration, shootings, bombings. These are not the sort of problems that can be tackled during one four-year term in office – and the SD have long positioned themselves as outsiders.”

One important change may be that Sweden supports the Danish and UK policy approach to “externalize” asylum processing. Only last week, Denmark reached a deal with Rwanda on this policy, which is wholeheartedly supported by SD.

The background of the success of the Sweden Democrats

Neuding further explains that the the success of SD is due to exploding gang crime in Sweden, which is linked to mass migration:

“For the first time ever in an election, crime emerged as the top priority among voters. But this is only to be expected, given that Sweden has Europe’s highest rate of gun murders and an epidemic of bombings with no equivalent or precedent anywhere else in the West.

Since the last election year, 2018, there have been almost 500 bombings (including hand grenades) and endless stories of gangland killings. Children have been caught in the crossfire. Shootings are a regular part of Swedish life and the system cannot cope. (…)

At least two bombs were detonated in the week before the election, and another was found at a music festival in Stockholm. Sweden’s police never trained for this kind of problem. They find themselves dealing with a society within a society, one they struggle to penetrate.

Police say there are now at least 60 immigrant neighbourhoods over which they have little control. Some 300 officers were injured when massive riots broke out in these areas in the spring, and Sweden’s chief of police has warned of a ‘brutality we haven’t seen before’.”

In that regard, noteworthy is also the rise of the brand new Islamist party “Nyans”, which secured between 15-25% in areas with a lot of immigrants and even 30.9 percent in the Rosengård borough of Malmö, where famous Swedish football player Zlatan Ibrahimović grew up.

The outgoing leftwing government had already chosen security and organised crime as priorities, but as the election result shows, to little avail.

SD is not merely a party of “native” Swedes. 12 percent of voters with a non-European background voted for the Sweden Democrats, thereby becoming the third most popular choice for them. Also among young voters – those under 30 years old – the party acquired third place, convincing 18 percent of them, while becoming the second most popular party among workers, with 29 percent.

According to prominent SD MEP Charlie Weimers, also the fact that the Swedish government shut down four nuclear reactors played a role in the defeat of the government coalition.

An increasingly eurosceptic Swedish debate

Eurosceptic commentary is also increasingly noticeable in the Swedish public discourse. Trade unions and leftist parties in both Sweden and Denmark have been railing against the EU’s minimum wage directive, considering it to be a danger for their labour market models, which involve trade unions and employers negotiating working conditions directly with each other with close to no involvement of the State. Back in January, Torbjörn Johansson, the negotiation secretary of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO), described the EU directive, which has now been passed by the European Parliament and was ultimately also backed by the Swedish government, as the “most serious external threat in modern times” for the Swedish collective bargaining model.

Also the EU’s attempts to influence national forest policies is seen as troublesome up North. Again MEP Charlie Weimers has complained that “despite a lack of provisions in the EU treaties for a common forest policy, the EU has gradually expanded its powers in this policy area since a 1999 Court of Justice of the European Union ruling recognised EU competence on environmental action in forests.”

Dr. Björn Hägglund, a Swedish academic and former Director General of the Swedish Forest Agency, has on this turn warned that “the EU Commission got its forest strategy wrong,” noting it “will have negative implications for Nordic forestry,” because, amongst others “the Commission seems to advocate continuity forestry, without regeneration felling (which is when the greater part of a forest is felled where most of the trees are fully grown) and by doing so ignoring the complex biology of the Nordic forests.” He explains that “This model was applied on a large scale in Sweden from around 1920 to 1950. … But the result was catastrophic. The remaining trees were unable to form new productive forest areas, and instead enormous areas arose that were sparsely grown with mainly spruce and birch.”

Two years ago, the EU agreement to create an 800 billion euro jointly financed EU Covid recovery fund – since plagued by stories of lack of transparency on how the funds are spent – caused quite a bit of uproar in non-Eurozone member state Sweden, with the political editor of mass-circulation Swedish daily Expressen even evoking the prospect of a Swedish EU exit because of the creation of this “recovery fund”, as he wrote: “Soon, Sweden will need to make a choice about the EU”.

Local Swedish conservative newspaper NWT then described the fund as an “EU-federalist attack”:

Reminiscient of the Brexit debate in the UK is how also Swedish industry federations are becoming more vocally critical of the EU. In June, the chief economist of the Association of Swedish Engineering Industries stated that “there is a risk that the [EU] moves away from free trade and towards greater political and governmental interference. This affects Swedish competitiveness negatively”, citing the UK’s departure as one of the reasons of this development, warning: “It would be counterproductive and unfortunate if the EU, in order to meet increasing global competition, tries to copy the Chinese growth model.”

A similar analysis has been made by Stefan Sagebro, an expert on competition issues at Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, who singled out the EU’s Chips Act for criticism, saying: “No one has asked the question whether it is really good to start large-scale production here in Europe and whether it really secures us against shortages in the future.”

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