The Alliance for Sweden, an electoral coalition headed by the conservative Moderate Party, won 48 percent of the vote, edging out the Social Democratic-led coalition’s 46 percent. Moderate party leader Fredrik Reinfeldt will replace Göran Persson as prime minister.

Reinfeldt focused his campaign on calls to cut welfare programs and create more jobs. He has promised to reduce unemployment benefits, sick leave payments, and employers’ social security contributions for young workers. He also proposed cutting property and estate taxes for the wealthy.

He argued that the official unemployment rate of 5.7 percent was misleading, and that the actual rate is more than 20 percent if you include people who have taken early retirement or who are on long-term sickness or disability leave or in government job training programs.

In the elections four years ago the Moderates’ main issue was lowering taxes and the need for a “system change,” and they received their lowest vote in decades. Since Reinfeldt became party leader he has toned down some of the more conservative aspects of its policies. It now calls itself the new Moderates, and pledges that it will keep the basic elements of the existing welfare state. This time the Moderates increased their vote in the general elections by 11 percent.

The Social Democrats remain the largest single party, receiving 35 percent of the vote. The cutbacks proposed by the Moderates will build on previous attacks by the Social Democrats on the pension system and other aspects of workers’ social wage.

The election, which registered the ongoing rightward shift in bourgeois politics, also marked the growth of the ultrarightist Sweden Democrats. The main election theme of that party was sharp cuts in immigration and advocating an “ethnically and culturally homogenous” nation. It also campaigned for reinforcing the police.

The Sweden Democrats received nearly 3 percent of the vote, shy of the 4 percent required for a seat in parliament. However, in local parliaments it won seats in 145 areas, up from 31 in the last elections. In Landskrona, a small town in the south of Sweden, it received 22 percent of the vote. The party will now qualify for state financial support, amounting to about $5.5 million over the four-year period before the next elections.  
 
 
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