Update #80: Swedish general election, 2010 (Feat. EvilSpaceAlien)
After a lot of work with @EvilSpaceAlien, I give you this TL's first co-authored update. Anything enjoyable from this installment, you can thank EPA. Anything confusing, that is likely on me. Hope you all enjoy this update, a lot of work was put into it. And don't forget, if you haven't voted already, please take the time to vote in the Turtledove Poll, even if it isn't for my TL (although I hope you'll give it some consideration).
Going into the 2010 general election, Prime Minister Anna Lindh and the Social Democrats hoped that despite their almost sixteen years in power, voters would be willing to extend their mandate at least one more time. When Lindh was sworn-in as Sweden’s first female Prime Minister, replacing the increasingly unpopular Göran Persson, the country had entered into an unprecedented period of economic boom and rapidly declining unemployment, two facts that had proved critical to their 2006 re-election against Fredrik Reinfeldt and The Alliance. It also helped that Lindh, by virtue of not being Persson, immediately undercut the opposition’s message that the Social Democrats had grown old, tired, and bankrupt of new ideas.
Yet for all their success in keeping The Alliance at bay, the Social Democrat’s victory in 2006 resulted in a situation that required some concessions. After threatening to go into coalition with the Liberal People’s, Centre and Christian Democratic parties in 2002, the Greens would successfully join the Social Democrats in government. Although a partnership with the Greens made sense, there was far more hesitation when it came to the Left. Many within the government felt as though accepting the more left-wing political party would draw the Social Democrats further away from the political centre. For years, thanks to having opposition on both their left and right flanks, the government had appeared more moderate by comparison. Luckily for Anna Lindh, since The Left would never be able to successfully justify bringing down a left-leaning government in favour of a right-wing coalition, the latter party simply abstained from voting on matters dealing with confidence, thus allowing the government to live out its entire mandate. As for the government’s agenda, the largest focus of the Social Democrat-Green government dealt with Universal dental care. The first change was raising the limit for when dental care would be free, from up to nineteen years to twenty-four. Second was the implementation of a subsidy of seventy percent of the cost of treatments exceeding twenty-seven hundred SEK. Costs exceeding fifteen-thousand SEK would be now subsidized by ninety percent, with the cost for check-ups capped at two-hundred SEK. The next major platform of their campaign manifesto dealt with infrastructure, an issue where the Social Democrats, the Greens, and The Left were in complete alignment. Government investment in housing and public transport was expanded even further, including new funding for new rail projects, specifically the North Bothnia Line and expansions of the Stockholm metro. Although initially criticized as wasteful spending, with the onset of the global financial crisis, such spending was quickly deemed a necessary stimulus measure. Finally, regarding unemployment benefits, the government followed through with its election pledge to raise the cap under which one can receive 80% of one’s previous wage in unemployment benefits after losing a job to roughly twenty-five thousand SEK per month, much to the chagrin of the conservative opposition parties.
But the Alliance's dismay at the Social Democrats changes to taxation were nothing compared to their outrage over the latter’s approach to the financial crisis. As part of their response, the Social Democrats opted to embrace spending rather than tax cuts. When GM wanted to shut down Saab Automobile, the government worked nonstop in an attempt to save it, even if that meant bailing them out and the government becoming a shareholder. But becoming a shareholder would ultimately not be enough. It became clear that if the government was truly interested in saving the ailing caremaker, the government would need to go into partnership with a private company, which wound up being Magna International. The entire affair further divided the line between the left and right parties in the legislature, especially when dealing with the question over when the government would sell its shares.
However, the Alliance still had their own internal challenges to deal with. The centre-right unity which had been formed with the creation of the Alliance for Sweden ahead of the 2006 election was a milestone in Swedish politics. Never before in Swedish politics had the various centre-right parties in parliament formed a truly united front with a fully costed manifesto before. But come 2006 that is exactly what they did, so all that was left to ask was if that could be sustained after their defeat. In a joint press conference following the results of the 2006 election, the leaders of the four centre-right parties announced that the Alliance for Sweden was entering into a less formal association, as each individual party would move to develop their own platform and their own policies separately from one another, while at the same time aiming to campaign on a joint manifesto as the Alliance come 2010. The biography of then-People’s Party leader Lars Leijonborg later revealed that it had originally been his wish to completely dissolve and leave the Alliance project after the hammering the party suffered in the election, but relented following pressure from the rest of his fellow right-leaning colleagues. However, the less formal interaction between the four parties meant that the close cooperation enjoyed by the members of the Alliance was rendered moot. Aside from the occasional joint press conference on issues where all four parties happened to overlap, they returned to being individual entities in parliament. Still, the plan for the upcoming election was much the same as it had in the lead-up to the 2006 election; the Alliance would work to find compromise solutions to all major policy areas prior to the election, with the goal of presenting a joint shadow budget in the fall of 2009 as a big show of unity ahead of the campaign.
But, just like in the first negotiations and the post-election disagreements, it was the Liberal People’s Party which proved to be the most troublesome negotiating partner. Like Leijonborg, the party’s new leader, Jan Björklund, made the judgement that the Alliance had not been beneficial to their party, and that the various far-reaching compromises with the other parties had gone too far in erasing the differences between them. As such, this meant that fewer voters would be inclined to vote for the People’s Party, and would likely be more willing to lend their support towards any of the other three Alliance parties. Therefore, the People’s Party grew all the more resistant to further compromises with the other parties, in spite of eager overtures from the Moderates, who saw the fully costed manifesto presented before the previous election as the reason why they came so close to bringing to an end the Social Democrats more than a decade long time in office. The Refusal of the People’s Party to budge over key parts of the budget made relations between the parties grow increasingly frosty, as they were often the only party that wasn’t on board, in particular when it came to the social insurance system where the People’s Party wanted to make much smaller cuts than their centre-right colleagues. The People’s Party wanted to cut taxes for those with higher incomes were diametrically opposite to the views of the Moderate’s strategy. The Moderates wished to use working tax credits targeted at lower to middle income earners. It quickly became apparent to Fredrik Reinfeldt, Maud Olofsson and Göran Hägglund, that the dream of presenting a joint shadow budget ahead of the next election was dead. Instead, The Alliance would have to settle for releasing a joint manifesto together, a manifesto which would be far less detailed and in depth than the one presented four years earlier.
Suffice to say, the incumbent Social Democrats were enjoying the situation that their opponents now found themselves in. Once again, the centre-right appeared incapable of getting their act together, much less govern the country. That being said, the government still had to tackle problems of its own. For while the government was seen to have weathered the storm of the global financial crisis completely, as Sweden emerged much better off than certain other European countries, particularly with the highest growth of GDP since 1970, the Social Democrats were an increasingly old and tired government. Arguing that that electing an opposition which couldn’t even agree on a budget was a recipe for disaster, just like the chaos spreading through Greece, Ireland and other European countries, the fact of the matter was still that unemployment figures nearing nine percent was never a great place to start a bid for four more years, the government had still been in charge for sixteen years. Voters, who had become increasingly accustomed to the emergence of various scandals, resulting in a general lack of enthusiasm for the Social Democrats. It certainly didn’t help having several former ministers such as Thomas Östros and former PM Göran Persson take up jobs with lobbying groups or consultancy firms for hefty pay checks after leaving politics, and it definitely didn’t look good when Wanja Lundby-Wedin, President of LO (the Swedish TUC) and member of the Social Democratic Party’s executive board had approved bonus and pension deals totalling more than one hundred million SEK for a CEO in her role as LO’s representative on the board of AMF Pension. Thanks to benefits received from boards she served on as an LO representative, she had also earned several hundred thousand SEK more than a quick glance at her wage as LO President would lead one to believe. While she of course hadn’t done anything illegal, it just simply did not look good for a supposed representative of working people to enjoy that type of lifestyle.
As the campaign kicked into high gear towards the end of summer, the two ”blocs” were polling neck and neck, with every sign pointing towards yet another incredibly close election being in store for the Swedish people. Anna Lindh, very much comfortable in her role after six years in power and coming off a relatively successful term as President of the European Council in the previous year, had approval ratings in the low 50s while she steadily polled ahead of Fredrik Reinfeldt as preferred Prime Minister, but not by much. The Moderate election machine had struck upon a working concept in the previous election and in a bid to further project an air of competency and strong economic stewardship, the party openly pledged to only cut taxes once the budget was balanced once more, something which the Social Democrats attacked as contradicting the numerous pledges to cut taxes promised by the three other Alliance parties. Meanwhile, as the two big lions got most of the attention as they mainly fought about the economy and unemployment, there was still plenty of room for some of the smaller parties to grow. One the right Jan Björklund had emerged as the second most popular party leader after Reinfeldt, with his bombastic rhetoric and harsh attacks against the government working wonders for the newest opposition party leader. While the focus on education policy, which included attacks against the Social Democrats for taking a too lax approach to education when there in his eyes was a serious need for more discipline in schools, was nothing new coming from the People’s Party, the party also attempted to expand by going after people who had previously voted Moderate but were disappointed with the party’s recent embrace of the centre ground. With pledges entailing more funding for the armed forces than the rest of The Alliance and a strong focus on law and order the Liberal People’s Party hoped that at least some of these voters could be enticed to make the jump and vote for the other blue party. The strategy appeared to be working, as the party rose in the polls and so did the importance of education in the eyes of the voters, as it rose from being the seventh most important political issue by the start of the year, to third towards the end of the campaign.
Outside of the Riksdag, a number of minor parties were also struggling to get media exposure in their quixotic attempts to get into parliament. The Feminist Initiative led by former Left Party leader Gudrun Schyman looked to be stuck around half of a percent just like in the last election. The Pirate Party seemed to have disappeared of the face of the Earth completely after their near miss of winning representation in the European Parliament in 2009. As for the Sweden Democrats, still under the leadership of Mikael Jansson since 1995, the former Neo-Nazi party had grown more and more divided in recent years after a number of leadership challenges against Jansson, bitter personal conflicts between members of the top brass, with their latest congress in 2009 descending into several members breaking out into an open fistfight in the conference hall. After that congress, some of the more moderate members of the Sweden Democrats had broken off to form the Progress Party under the leadership of Richard Jomshof, but lack of adequate funding meant that they had even more difficulty finding media exposure. If Sweden was ever going to see an eighth party entering its parliament, at the very least it would not be in the 2010 election.
As the election grew closer and the debates grew more heated, polls finally showed that once side was beginning to pull ahead of the other as the Moderate and Liberal People’s parties slowly but surely ticked up in the polls and dragged the rest of them Alliance with them. Or maybe it was simply the case that after sixteen years straight of Social Democratic rule, the voters felt that it was time to let someone else take the wheel. With one hundred and seventy-nine seats to the Red-Greens’ one hundred and seventy, The Alliance could form government with a comfortable majority, the first centre-right majority government since the collapse Thorbjörn Fälldin’s second government in 1981. However with such a thin joint manifesto the majority of the most difficult negotiations still had to be done after the election, and with the most difficult negotiating partner in The Alliance emboldened by their gains, there was no telling how difficult the coming term would be for Prime Minister Reinfeldt.
Prime Ministers of the Kingdom of Sweden
Carl Bildt (Moderate) 1991-1994
Ingvar Carlsson (Social Democrats) 1994-1996
Göran Persson (Social Democrats) 1996-2004
Anna Lindh (Social Democrats) 2004-2010
Fredrik Reinfeldt (Moderate) 2010-
Going into the 2010 general election, Prime Minister Anna Lindh and the Social Democrats hoped that despite their almost sixteen years in power, voters would be willing to extend their mandate at least one more time. When Lindh was sworn-in as Sweden’s first female Prime Minister, replacing the increasingly unpopular Göran Persson, the country had entered into an unprecedented period of economic boom and rapidly declining unemployment, two facts that had proved critical to their 2006 re-election against Fredrik Reinfeldt and The Alliance. It also helped that Lindh, by virtue of not being Persson, immediately undercut the opposition’s message that the Social Democrats had grown old, tired, and bankrupt of new ideas.
Yet for all their success in keeping The Alliance at bay, the Social Democrat’s victory in 2006 resulted in a situation that required some concessions. After threatening to go into coalition with the Liberal People’s, Centre and Christian Democratic parties in 2002, the Greens would successfully join the Social Democrats in government. Although a partnership with the Greens made sense, there was far more hesitation when it came to the Left. Many within the government felt as though accepting the more left-wing political party would draw the Social Democrats further away from the political centre. For years, thanks to having opposition on both their left and right flanks, the government had appeared more moderate by comparison. Luckily for Anna Lindh, since The Left would never be able to successfully justify bringing down a left-leaning government in favour of a right-wing coalition, the latter party simply abstained from voting on matters dealing with confidence, thus allowing the government to live out its entire mandate. As for the government’s agenda, the largest focus of the Social Democrat-Green government dealt with Universal dental care. The first change was raising the limit for when dental care would be free, from up to nineteen years to twenty-four. Second was the implementation of a subsidy of seventy percent of the cost of treatments exceeding twenty-seven hundred SEK. Costs exceeding fifteen-thousand SEK would be now subsidized by ninety percent, with the cost for check-ups capped at two-hundred SEK. The next major platform of their campaign manifesto dealt with infrastructure, an issue where the Social Democrats, the Greens, and The Left were in complete alignment. Government investment in housing and public transport was expanded even further, including new funding for new rail projects, specifically the North Bothnia Line and expansions of the Stockholm metro. Although initially criticized as wasteful spending, with the onset of the global financial crisis, such spending was quickly deemed a necessary stimulus measure. Finally, regarding unemployment benefits, the government followed through with its election pledge to raise the cap under which one can receive 80% of one’s previous wage in unemployment benefits after losing a job to roughly twenty-five thousand SEK per month, much to the chagrin of the conservative opposition parties.
But the Alliance's dismay at the Social Democrats changes to taxation were nothing compared to their outrage over the latter’s approach to the financial crisis. As part of their response, the Social Democrats opted to embrace spending rather than tax cuts. When GM wanted to shut down Saab Automobile, the government worked nonstop in an attempt to save it, even if that meant bailing them out and the government becoming a shareholder. But becoming a shareholder would ultimately not be enough. It became clear that if the government was truly interested in saving the ailing caremaker, the government would need to go into partnership with a private company, which wound up being Magna International. The entire affair further divided the line between the left and right parties in the legislature, especially when dealing with the question over when the government would sell its shares.
However, the Alliance still had their own internal challenges to deal with. The centre-right unity which had been formed with the creation of the Alliance for Sweden ahead of the 2006 election was a milestone in Swedish politics. Never before in Swedish politics had the various centre-right parties in parliament formed a truly united front with a fully costed manifesto before. But come 2006 that is exactly what they did, so all that was left to ask was if that could be sustained after their defeat. In a joint press conference following the results of the 2006 election, the leaders of the four centre-right parties announced that the Alliance for Sweden was entering into a less formal association, as each individual party would move to develop their own platform and their own policies separately from one another, while at the same time aiming to campaign on a joint manifesto as the Alliance come 2010. The biography of then-People’s Party leader Lars Leijonborg later revealed that it had originally been his wish to completely dissolve and leave the Alliance project after the hammering the party suffered in the election, but relented following pressure from the rest of his fellow right-leaning colleagues. However, the less formal interaction between the four parties meant that the close cooperation enjoyed by the members of the Alliance was rendered moot. Aside from the occasional joint press conference on issues where all four parties happened to overlap, they returned to being individual entities in parliament. Still, the plan for the upcoming election was much the same as it had in the lead-up to the 2006 election; the Alliance would work to find compromise solutions to all major policy areas prior to the election, with the goal of presenting a joint shadow budget in the fall of 2009 as a big show of unity ahead of the campaign.
But, just like in the first negotiations and the post-election disagreements, it was the Liberal People’s Party which proved to be the most troublesome negotiating partner. Like Leijonborg, the party’s new leader, Jan Björklund, made the judgement that the Alliance had not been beneficial to their party, and that the various far-reaching compromises with the other parties had gone too far in erasing the differences between them. As such, this meant that fewer voters would be inclined to vote for the People’s Party, and would likely be more willing to lend their support towards any of the other three Alliance parties. Therefore, the People’s Party grew all the more resistant to further compromises with the other parties, in spite of eager overtures from the Moderates, who saw the fully costed manifesto presented before the previous election as the reason why they came so close to bringing to an end the Social Democrats more than a decade long time in office. The Refusal of the People’s Party to budge over key parts of the budget made relations between the parties grow increasingly frosty, as they were often the only party that wasn’t on board, in particular when it came to the social insurance system where the People’s Party wanted to make much smaller cuts than their centre-right colleagues. The People’s Party wanted to cut taxes for those with higher incomes were diametrically opposite to the views of the Moderate’s strategy. The Moderates wished to use working tax credits targeted at lower to middle income earners. It quickly became apparent to Fredrik Reinfeldt, Maud Olofsson and Göran Hägglund, that the dream of presenting a joint shadow budget ahead of the next election was dead. Instead, The Alliance would have to settle for releasing a joint manifesto together, a manifesto which would be far less detailed and in depth than the one presented four years earlier.
Suffice to say, the incumbent Social Democrats were enjoying the situation that their opponents now found themselves in. Once again, the centre-right appeared incapable of getting their act together, much less govern the country. That being said, the government still had to tackle problems of its own. For while the government was seen to have weathered the storm of the global financial crisis completely, as Sweden emerged much better off than certain other European countries, particularly with the highest growth of GDP since 1970, the Social Democrats were an increasingly old and tired government. Arguing that that electing an opposition which couldn’t even agree on a budget was a recipe for disaster, just like the chaos spreading through Greece, Ireland and other European countries, the fact of the matter was still that unemployment figures nearing nine percent was never a great place to start a bid for four more years, the government had still been in charge for sixteen years. Voters, who had become increasingly accustomed to the emergence of various scandals, resulting in a general lack of enthusiasm for the Social Democrats. It certainly didn’t help having several former ministers such as Thomas Östros and former PM Göran Persson take up jobs with lobbying groups or consultancy firms for hefty pay checks after leaving politics, and it definitely didn’t look good when Wanja Lundby-Wedin, President of LO (the Swedish TUC) and member of the Social Democratic Party’s executive board had approved bonus and pension deals totalling more than one hundred million SEK for a CEO in her role as LO’s representative on the board of AMF Pension. Thanks to benefits received from boards she served on as an LO representative, she had also earned several hundred thousand SEK more than a quick glance at her wage as LO President would lead one to believe. While she of course hadn’t done anything illegal, it just simply did not look good for a supposed representative of working people to enjoy that type of lifestyle.
As the campaign kicked into high gear towards the end of summer, the two ”blocs” were polling neck and neck, with every sign pointing towards yet another incredibly close election being in store for the Swedish people. Anna Lindh, very much comfortable in her role after six years in power and coming off a relatively successful term as President of the European Council in the previous year, had approval ratings in the low 50s while she steadily polled ahead of Fredrik Reinfeldt as preferred Prime Minister, but not by much. The Moderate election machine had struck upon a working concept in the previous election and in a bid to further project an air of competency and strong economic stewardship, the party openly pledged to only cut taxes once the budget was balanced once more, something which the Social Democrats attacked as contradicting the numerous pledges to cut taxes promised by the three other Alliance parties. Meanwhile, as the two big lions got most of the attention as they mainly fought about the economy and unemployment, there was still plenty of room for some of the smaller parties to grow. One the right Jan Björklund had emerged as the second most popular party leader after Reinfeldt, with his bombastic rhetoric and harsh attacks against the government working wonders for the newest opposition party leader. While the focus on education policy, which included attacks against the Social Democrats for taking a too lax approach to education when there in his eyes was a serious need for more discipline in schools, was nothing new coming from the People’s Party, the party also attempted to expand by going after people who had previously voted Moderate but were disappointed with the party’s recent embrace of the centre ground. With pledges entailing more funding for the armed forces than the rest of The Alliance and a strong focus on law and order the Liberal People’s Party hoped that at least some of these voters could be enticed to make the jump and vote for the other blue party. The strategy appeared to be working, as the party rose in the polls and so did the importance of education in the eyes of the voters, as it rose from being the seventh most important political issue by the start of the year, to third towards the end of the campaign.
Outside of the Riksdag, a number of minor parties were also struggling to get media exposure in their quixotic attempts to get into parliament. The Feminist Initiative led by former Left Party leader Gudrun Schyman looked to be stuck around half of a percent just like in the last election. The Pirate Party seemed to have disappeared of the face of the Earth completely after their near miss of winning representation in the European Parliament in 2009. As for the Sweden Democrats, still under the leadership of Mikael Jansson since 1995, the former Neo-Nazi party had grown more and more divided in recent years after a number of leadership challenges against Jansson, bitter personal conflicts between members of the top brass, with their latest congress in 2009 descending into several members breaking out into an open fistfight in the conference hall. After that congress, some of the more moderate members of the Sweden Democrats had broken off to form the Progress Party under the leadership of Richard Jomshof, but lack of adequate funding meant that they had even more difficulty finding media exposure. If Sweden was ever going to see an eighth party entering its parliament, at the very least it would not be in the 2010 election.
As the election grew closer and the debates grew more heated, polls finally showed that once side was beginning to pull ahead of the other as the Moderate and Liberal People’s parties slowly but surely ticked up in the polls and dragged the rest of them Alliance with them. Or maybe it was simply the case that after sixteen years straight of Social Democratic rule, the voters felt that it was time to let someone else take the wheel. With one hundred and seventy-nine seats to the Red-Greens’ one hundred and seventy, The Alliance could form government with a comfortable majority, the first centre-right majority government since the collapse Thorbjörn Fälldin’s second government in 1981. However with such a thin joint manifesto the majority of the most difficult negotiations still had to be done after the election, and with the most difficult negotiating partner in The Alliance emboldened by their gains, there was no telling how difficult the coming term would be for Prime Minister Reinfeldt.
Prime Ministers of the Kingdom of Sweden
Carl Bildt (Moderate) 1991-1994
Ingvar Carlsson (Social Democrats) 1994-1996
Göran Persson (Social Democrats) 1996-2004
Anna Lindh (Social Democrats) 2004-2010
Fredrik Reinfeldt (Moderate) 2010-
