Breaking: Win For The Right In Sweden?
I’ll be taking a bit of a mental health day.
This story began last night—I saw stories quoting the Left in Sweden as still believing they’ll win, but being on pins and needles. This morning John Hinderaker wrote that it’s beginning to look that the Right coalition, leading, will hold on. TGP has a post now claiming that, despite absentee ballots still to be counted, it looks final:
Right-Wing Sweden Democrats Triumph in Historic Vote! More Mail-In Ballots Incoming!
Significantly, the populist Sweden Democrats have taken the overall party line lead at 20%—their best recent showing was 12%. There are four parties on the right and four on the left. Previously the Moderate party had been the leading Right party at 20% and the Social Democrats led the Left and the country at 27%.
This is a big switch, and I have to admit that I don’t know if there’s more behind it than what has been cited generally—unhappiness with immigration policies and the resulting crime. TGP quotes the Sweden Democrat leader:
“I think (our success) can be explained by the fact that people don’t think the other parties take their problems seriously”, Åkesson told AFP at an election rally in Stockholm in August. Åkesson has called the mass immigration of half a million Muslims into the country of 10 million “the biggest foreign threat since World War II”.
How will this affect—will it affect—Swedish foreign policy toward Russia and NATO? Sweden does have longstanding ties to NATO. Nevertheless, the Left run previous government avoided a parliamentary vote on actual membership in NATO. This bears watching.
Regardless how the results play out in forming a government, this is still a stunning upset against the Left that will reverberate in EU politics. The Italian Right is predicted to win a crushing victory.
What all this means in terms of actual political positions remains to be seen. Equating any European parties with US parties is almost sure to be a mistake. But the growth of "populism" on both sides of the Atlantic seems a common denominator for the time being.
When push comes to shove, the Moderate Party will fold itself into the Social Democrat Party in a grand "coalition" to leave the Swedish Democrats in opposition. This has been a repeating pattern in European politics for the last 10 years.