קטגוריה: Scandinavia

The center-left won Sweden's election by a slim margin, but now comes the hard part

Published in Haaretz: Swedish Election Left the Blocs Closer on Policy – But Split Over Israel and Antisemitism

Following a tight, polarized election campaign, Sweden woke up Monday morning to a result that almost couldn't be any closer. According to preliminary results, the four opposition parties – the Social Democrats, the Left Party, the Center Party and the Greens – won a combined 176 of the 349 seats in parliament, against 173 for the right-wing bloc. If the result holds, it will mark the end of the center-right government led by Ulf Kristersson and the possible return of Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson as Sweden's prime minister.

The result, however, is not yet final. More votes will be counted on Wednesday, including late-arriving early ballots and votes from abroad, and the Swedish Election Authority is expected to announce the final result only later in the week. The gap between the blocs is small enough that even a shift of a few seats could prove significant. Andersson said on election night that if the current result holds, "Sweden will get a new government." Kristersson, for his part, has not conceded.

The result largely reflects the unusual character of this campaign. Unlike the previous election, in 2022, when immigration and crime were front and center, this time no single issue dominated. The various parties tried to push the issues that suited them – the economy and taxes, healthcare, schools, crime, energy and immigration – but on several of the sharp disputes that once divided right and left, the gaps have narrowed considerably.

The dispute over immigration policy, for example, narrowed after the Social Democrats adopted a policy supporting reduced immigration and stricter requirements for integrating immigrants. Almost all the parties now back NATO membership and a significant increase in the defense budget, and there is also broad agreement on the need to step up the fight against organized crime.

It was against this backdrop that the campaign became especially polarized. Instead of a sharp argument over the direction of a single policy, much of it revolved around the question of who would sit in the next government. The right warned against a "red-green" government in which the Left Party would wield unprecedented influence, while the center-left warned against the populist right-wing Sweden Democrats entering government for the first time. Now, after the election, that question is shifting from a campaign talking point to the practical problem of forming a government.

In recent years, Sweden has been led by a center-right government headed by Kristersson of the conservative-liberal Moderates (Moderaterna). The government had no parliamentary majority and relied on two coalition partners – the Liberals and the Christian Democrats – as well as on the Sweden Democrats, which backed it from the outside and had considerable influence over its policies.

For most of the campaign, the polls gave the opposition a clear lead. At one point the gap reached around 10 percent, and an Andersson victory seemed almost certain. But in the final weeks that gap narrowed rapidly, and in the end the race stayed open almost until the very last vote.

Two senior figures in the outgoing coalition spoke to Haaretz before the election about how they saw the contest. The Social Democrats and the Center Party declined to be interviewed.

Joar Forssell of the Liberal Party (Liberalerna), a classic center-right party, who chairs the parliamentary Committee on Education, said that as far as his party was concerned, the answer to the question of what stood at the center of the election was education. The party, which has held the education portfolio for the past four years, wanted to keep it in order to improve student outcomes, strengthen the standing of teachers and continue removing smartphones and screens from schools.

The difficulty in identifying a single issue at the heart of the election, Forssell argued, was itself a sign of the outgoing government's success. "The current government has been delivering on many of the issues that have concerned Sweden in recent years," he said. "We have brought Sweden into NATO, we managed to reduce crime rates, we managed to accomplish a great deal in the schools, including new legislation banning mobile phones. Inflation is down, and economic growth is better than that of most European countries. The opposition is struggling to find an issue it can use to attack the government."

Alice Teodorescu Mawe, a member of the European Parliament for the Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna) and a candidate for the Swedish parliament, made a similar argument. In her view, the Social Democrats have in recent years moved closer to the right on issues that once defined the fault line in Swedish politics.

"When it comes to the general direction Sweden should take, the differences are relatively small, and there is broad agreement on issues such as migration and the reform of crime policy," she said, adding that the main ambition of the Social Democrats is to return to power and that, to achieve this, they have adopted positions similar to those of the governing coalition.

Teodorescu Mawe also pointed to a paradox that became Andersson's central problem: On some of these issues, the gap between the Social Democrats and their potential partners on the left – the Left Party and the Greens – is greater than the gap between the Social Democrats and the parties of the right-wing bloc. "These parties hold completely different positions on important issues such as nuclear power, the European Union and migration, and this is also one of the reasons why, since 2010, Swedish politics has repeatedly focused more on the composition of the coalition and the identity of the prime minister than on policy itself," she said. "That in itself is symptomatic: It is easier for journalists and politicians to talk about who is playing with whom than to deal with policy, and it is a win-win situation for everyone who is too lazy to get into a discussion about how the promises that have been made can actually be fulfilled."

For most of the 20th century, Sweden was a byword for a social-democratic welfare state. The Social Democrats ruled the country almost without interruption for more than 40 years, and during that time much of what became known as the "Swedish model" was built – powerful trade unions and extensive collective bargaining that brought a very large share of the economy under collective agreements. Alongside this, the state maintained a large public sector, universal public healthcare and education systems and a generous social safety net, financed by high taxes and producing relatively low levels of inequality.

In recent decades, right-wing and left-wing governments have alternated in power, and the model has changed following tax cuts, privatizations, the opening of public services to competition and reforms to benefits and pensions. But its basic skeleton has remained in place.

Even Forssell, a man of the center-right, does not propose dismantling the Swedish model. "Schools and the healthcare system will remain, and the core activities of the welfare state will continue to be financed almost entirely by taxes," he said. "The dividing line lies elsewhere: How large can the welfare state become before it turns into a nanny state? How much welfare can we provide before people become less concerned with finding a job or less concerned with contributing to society? Our government has proposed, for example, limiting the total amount of benefits a person can receive from the state. We want lower taxes and a system that does not reduce the incentive to work."

Teodorescu Mawe described a similar consensus. "There is agreement between the right and the left that Sweden should have a stable and generous welfare system, but a country that imposes such high taxes cannot accept poor public services, and in the coming years we will also face enormous defense expenditures, because security is at the heart of the welfare state – the state must first and foremost protect its citizens and its territory," she said.

She also opposes raising taxes, and emphasized the principle on which, she says, the model was originally built: "Everyone who can work should work. Today there are people, many of them immigrants, who do not work but still receive benefits, and this is destabilizing the system. That is why, for years, I have supported tying some welfare entitlements more closely to citizenship and to contributing to the financing of the system. Such measures would make clear that the welfare state is, to some extent, like a government insurance company: Here, too, you have to pay the premium before you can demand a payout."

Forssell and Teodorescu Mawe both believe the Swedish welfare model itself is not in danger. The Social Democrats, by contrast, largely framed the election as a battle over the future of the welfare state. They argued that four years of right-wing government were marked by the underfunding of the healthcare and education systems and by tax cuts for high earners.

In her speeches, Andersson repeatedly returned to the state of the schools, the long waits in the healthcare system and the erosion of welfare services. In a televised debate with Kristersson the week before the election, she said: "We're making the least sexy election promise, but the most important one – secure basic government funding for elderly care, for the healthcare system and for schools. When costs rise, government funding will rise too."