Vol. 74/No. 41      November 1, 2010

Never before has the Social Democratic party’s coalition lost two elections in a row. A coalition of four parties led by the Moderates, otherwise known as the Conservatives, won a plurality again with 173 seats, compared to 156 seats won by the Social Democratic Party’s Red-Green Coalition with the Green and Left parties.

The Social Democrats had dominated politics in Sweden since the 1930s, holding office for all but nine years between 1932 and 2006. This year the party itself got only 30.7 percent of the vote, the lowest since 1914 and just barely more than the Conservatives.

Neither of the two main coalitions garnered an outright majority, and both appear to have lost substantial votes for the first time to the right-wing Sweden Democrats, which took 20 seats.

Swedish capitalism suffered a financial crisis in the beginning of the 1990s, resulting from the implosion of a credit bubble centered in real estate. Banks teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and had to be bailed out by the state. Unemployment was more than 10 percent.

The government’s response to this has been two decades of deregulation and privatization of Swedish industries, initiated by the Social Democratic government in the mid-1990s. The Conservative-led government continued this course after it came to power in 2006.

Taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations were cut back. Today Sweden has a lower average corporate tax than the United States and a much lower tax rate on new investments.

With the lowest budget deficit in the European Union and a relatively strong growth rate this year, its economy is fairing better than many in Europe.

Based on a consensus of the capitalist parties in parliament in the 1990s, the government began a series of “reforms” in the social security system. The national pension system was partially privatized and the guaranteed state pension dramatically lowered. Pension payments are now tied to the performance of the economy. State pensions were reduced by 3 percent for 2010-2011 based on last year’s 5 percent decline of the gross national product. As a result, workers are increasingly working past the official retirement age of 65.

Official unemployment has remained between 8 percent and 9 percent over the past few years. For those under 25 years old, it’s more than 25 percent. Both the amount and maximum duration of unemployment compensation were lowered in 2007. Cutbacks in the national health insurance system went into effect at the beginning of 2008. At the opening of this year, some 15,000 workers on medical leave were forced to return to work or be cut off from health insurance. By September less than 400 of them held a full-time job. It is estimated that this will happen to another 75,000 workers in the coming few years.

Over the past decade, the Conservative party has taken over much of the rhetoric of the Social Democrats. It started calling itself the “new workers party” in the 2006 elections. It upped the ante this time around, with its self-proclaimed title of the “only workers party” and has presented itself as a defender of Sweden’s welfare system. At the same time, it has begun chipping away with cutbacks on sick leave and unemployment benefits, while providing work incentives such as tax rebates for those holding a job.

Expressen, a liberal daily, commented in its editorial September 20: “Everything that used to be the historic assets of social democracy is today the trump card of the Conservatives. For the Social Democrats now comes a time of difficult reappraisals.”

The new party in parliament, the Sweden Democrats, was founded in 1988 by members of the racist organization Keep Sweden Swedish. Since the 2005 election of its present chairman, Jimmie Åkesson, 31, the party has worked to change its image and gained a foothold in mainstream bourgeois politics. It changed the party emblem from a flame inspired by the National Front, a British Nazi group, to a flower; purged its most openly racist members; and prohibited members from donning Nazi regalia.

It has steadily increased its vote since it first stood in elections in 1998, winning nearly 6 percent of the vote this year.

A major aspect of the party’s campaign has been to scapegoat immigrants, especially Muslims, which comprise about 5 percent of Sweden’s population. “The issues we will never compromise on are immigration, crime, and the elderly,” Åkesson said after the elections.

“The decline of the social democracy and the rising support for the Sweden Democrats shows that the capitalist crisis deeply affects working people,” said Dag Tirsén, a meat worker and lead candidate for the Communist League in the elections. “Confidence in Swedish bourgeois socialism among workers is weakening. The scapegoating of the Roma people and of Muslims by leading capitalist politicians has played into the hands of the rightists.

“The way forward for working people is to use our unions and organize independent of the capitalist parties in order to fight against the bosses’ attacks on our solidarity, living standards, and political rights. This is part of the fight toward a proletarian revolution in which working people can wrest political power from the capitalists and begin to organize society in the interests of the great majority. In this context, the weakening of the social democratic bureaucracy is the weakening of an obstacle in the struggles that are coming.”
 
 
Related articles:
No letup in sight for high U.S. jobless rate  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home