The Swedish election is coming up this Sunday and this election is really something else. Sweden has for a long part been divided between two sides, the left and the right. Similar to the American politics where the left side is for bigger government and higher taxes while the right side is for the opposite. The difference now is that a third party has joined the madness of Swedish politics. The Sweden Democrats.
The Sweden Democrats are the opposition to the establishment. A nationalist conservative party with immigration as their main question. They’ve grown rapidly and are above 20 % in the polls. So instead of having two big parties, we now have three. The Sweden Democrats are making this election a lot more complicated than what it’s used to be.
There’s also another dilemma that will occur the day after election day. The left social democrats don’t want to form a government with the right moderates and no one of the older parties want to form a government with the Sweden Democrats. This makes the whole situation even more bizarre because a majority government will be impossible to form as long as they don’t want to engage in a government with one another.
Since the older parties are so politically correct they will do everything to keep the Sweden Democrats out of the government and even out of the negotiations of a new government. This will lead the power back into the hands of the Sweden Democrats. Since the social democrats or the moderates won’t have a majority the Sweden democrats can vote against any budget or government that they’re not involved in. Which is also very likely that they will. They’ve said it themselves. “We will not support any government where we won’t have any influence”. Since they won’t have any influence on the social democrats or the moderates they will be likely to vote against the budget and the new government, it doesn’t matter if it’s the social democrats or the moderates who forms it.
This means that if the established parties want to keep the Sweden democrats out of influence, they have to do some sort of coalition. It could be that they choose not to vote against each other’s budgets or that they will form a new government with each other and therefore have a majority in the parliament. The strategy of not voting against the other side’s budget is a common thing and happened after the election in 2014.
The two bigger parties agreed to not vote against the other side’s budget. Everything to keep the Sweden democrats out of influence. The biggest party could easily have their budget go through parliament and keep the Sweden democrats out. The consequence of this was that the Sweden democrats kept growing, growing and growing. By ignoring 13% of the population that voted for the Sweden democrats, a lot of people were angry. Of course, a moderate didn’t want to see their party collaborate with the socialists in the social democrats and of course a social democrat didn’t want to see their party collaborate with the liberal party.
The Sweden democrats’ new voters are mainly from the social democrats or the moderate party. A lot of them are tired of their original party to collate with the other side, just to ignore the Sweden democrats. Those votes are F you votes to their original party that has been so fed up with “not talking to the Sweden democrats” stuff.
The election on September 9th will be a raffling experience and the consequences will be seen later in the week when the parties are to form a new government. If the social democrats and the moderates make up some sort of an agreement to keep the Sweden democrats out of influence, you can be assured that the Sweden democrats will be by far the biggest party. If we have to wait until 2022 to have the Sweden democrats in the government or if they will be included now is something we won’t know until after the election. Something we do know though is that election day in Sweden will be a hell of a day.