Scandinavian Politics latest

Hej to all members of the Scandinavian Politics mailing list,

Here are a couple of brief updates on recent political events in Scandinavia.


First, to DENMARK. With the cartoons crisis having died down, a development occurred last week that may be of even greater interest to political scientists. (Thanks to Flemming Juul Christiansen of the University of Århus for his thoughts.)

On Friday the Social Liberal (Radikale Venstre) parliamentary group announced (in a "letter of freedom") that, after 13 years of close co-operation with the Social Democrats, the party would no longer support the Social Democrats' leader as their candidate for prime minister. The Social Liberals say that that their own leader, Marianne Jelved, is the person who they'd like to take the job. A more realistic development, though, is that the Social Liberals will try to displace the Danish People's Party as the Liberal-Conservative coalition's main support party in government. Indeed, some leading Social Liberals have stated this goal explicitly.

In some ways, this is yet another blow to the Social Democrats and their newish leader, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. It follows the publication of an opinion poll that puts them on just 19 per cent, which, if it were an election result, would be the party's worst score for 103 years. With the Social Liberals' poll rating now not too far behind the Social Democrats'
(and the Danish People's Party's), Jelved's party has clearly concluded that – to over-simplify the issue – policy influence will be more easily secured though pulling the government to the left than through pulling the Social Democrats to the right.

The extent to which the Liberals and Conservatives will be interested in forming a new constellation remains to be seen. The Danish People's Party has proved a noisy but fairly reliable supporter in parliament (although there is currently a row between the party and the government over a scandal concerning the minister for consumer and family affairs), and the party might well attract even more votes if it were relegated to a purer opposition role. Moreover, the divide over immigration policy, in which the Social Liberals take a much softer line than the government does (or, for that matter, the Social Democrats do), is still wide. Whatever, the new situation may well affect cross-party discussions on a major package of long-term welfare and labour-market policy proposals that the government proposed last Tuesday.


Meanwhile, in SWEDEN, the Social Democratic government's fortunes have taken some entertaining twists and turns recently.

* The resignation two and half weeks ago of the foreign minister was, of course, a blow to the government's image. But it had a silver lining.

As I wrote previously, Laila Freivalds was a political liability, and her disappearance from the political frontline will probably save as many votes in September's election as her resignation loses, if not more. (Her replacement, Jan Eliasson, is a diplomatic heavyweight. But his membership of the Social Democratic party had long since lapsed, and many have seen his appointment as another step towards the departification or presidentialisation of the Swedish cabinet.)

What's more, her resignation largely defused the impending report on the government's handling of the Asian tsunami in 2004 by the parliamentary Committee on the Constitution, which came out a week later. Its severe criticism of Freivalds's actions had been widely anticipated, and one of the government's support parties, the Greens, had pretty much committed itself to voting with the opposition if it moved a vote of no confidence in Freivalds. The prime minister, Göran Persson, had implied that if one of his ministers was forced out, he'd take the whole government out, too.
Presumably the Greens were vote-fishing or, perhaps more likely, signalling to the Social Democrats that their support for Persson's staying in power after the election could not be taken for granted. Whatever, Freivalds's resignation obviated this confrontation, and Persson could dismiss the parliamentary committee's biting criticism of him and five of his ministers as containing "little new".

* But last Friday became, in the words of one commentator, yet another "black day" for the Social Democrats.

(1) Persson himself was prosecuted for deficiencies in the planning of the building work on his estate in southern Sweden. This technical oversight is not such a embarrassment in itself. But it reminds voters of his rather grand private residence, which doesn't draw much admiration among Social Democrats. And the timing was unfortunate.

(2) The Social Democratic mayor of Malmö was prosecuted for accepting an exotic holiday from a contractor who his municipal government had given a lot of work to.

(3) Worst of all, the chair of Social Democratic Youth faced four charges in connection with a drunken pub-fight in January. Apparently, no independent witnesses heard her racially abusing the bar's bouncers, as they claim. But the police report does state that she and her mates threatened both the staff and the police that they would exploit their political "contacts", among whom the minister of justice was explicitly named. Again, this does nothing for the Social Democrats' image. The same political commentator described the gang as "young Social Democratic careerists who behave as if they belonged to a political aristocracy".

* All this overshadowed a demand a week ago by the Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman that the Swedish national team withdraw from this summer's football World Cup in Germany, as a protest against the use of prostitutes that he expects to occur there. That proposal raised lively discussion in my workplace.


Best,

Nick Aylott.
--
Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) | Department of Political Science, Umeå University | SE-901 87, Sweden | www.pol.umu.se

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