2006-09-18

Swedish election results

There was a historic outcome in the Swedish election yesterday.

* The Moderates, with their best result since 1928 and the biggest jump in support ever by a Swedish party, led the opposition Alliance for Sweden to victory. The four Alliance parties will have a small but clear parliamentary majority. Moderate leader Fredrik Reinfeldt will take over as prime minister in three weeks or so.

* The ruling Social Democrats obtained their worst score since 1920. Göran Persson, party leader and prime minister since 1996, announced last night his intention to resign from both positions. A special party congress will elect his successor in March.

How could this electoral shift happen when the economy is growing so impressively? Much will be surely written on the subject, but, very briefly, two reasons can be identified.

1. In a speech on May 1st, Persson predicted that unemployment would not be a major issue in the campaign. He was wrong. The Alliance pushed it relentlessly, and their success in doing so was apparent in the campaign debates, in the main exit poll published this morning, and, crucially, in the criticism aired from within the labour movement that the Social Democrats - remarkably, given their historical emphasis on it - lacked a convincing strategy for addressing the issue.

2. The effort put into the Alliance by its four parties has been immense, and clearly boosted their collecive credibility as an alternative government. It also presented a favourable contrast with the left bloc, whose three parties preferred to leave policy compromises and, perhaps just as importantly, the form of their co-operation - full coalition, semi-coalition or something else - until after the election. The Left and the Greens' leaders criticised the Social Democrats for their refusal to promise a coalition in advance.

There may still be small adjustments in the final results, but just now they stand as the following (with their 2002 equivalents in brackets).


+ Left Party: 5.8% (8.3%), 22 seats (30)
+ Social Democrats: 35.2% (39.8%), 130 seats (144)
+ Greens: 5.2% (4.6%), 19 seats (17)
LEFT BLOC: 46.2% (52.7%), 171 seats (191)

+ Centre Party: 7.9% (6.1%), 29 seats (22)
+ Liberals: 7.5% (13.3%), 28 seats (48)
+ Christian Democrats: 6.6% (9.1%), 24 seats (33)
+ Moderates: 26.1% (15.2%), 97 seats (55)
ALLIANCE: 48.1% (43.7%), 178 seats (158)

Turnout seems set to be comfortably above 80%.

Source: Election Authority (val.se).


As can be seen, the Left, Liberals and Christian Democrats all suffered significant losses - but probably not to the extent that, given the circumstances, their party leaders' positions will be threatened. Apart from the Moderates, the big winners were the Centre. Votes given to parties outside parliament rose markedly, with the far-right Sweden Democrats winning nearly 2% and Feminist Initiative about 1%.

Best,

Nick Aylott.
--
Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) in political science
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University College
SE-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
www.sh.se

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be interested. To join the Scandinavian Politics mailing list, send a message to me, the convenor (nicholas.aylott@sh.se). If you want to send something to the list, or if you don't want to receive these occasional messages, just let me know. See also www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/scandinavia/

2006-09-13

Scandinavian Politics: election latest

1. The Swedish campaign has entered its last few days. Most polls give the
bourgeois Alliance a very small lead, but basically the rival blocs are
neck and neck.

The hacking scandal rumbles on. (Some are suggesting that the former
Liberal party secretary, who resigned last week, has not been entirely
straight about how he reacted when he heard in March about the intrusion
into the Social Democrats' intranet.) But while the Liberals have clearly
lost support, their decline hasn't (so far) been quite as catastrophic as
some predicted; and most of that supoprt seems to have gone to other
Alliance parties.

Otherwise, the tightness of the contest has been reflected by the
unusually harsh words that have been exchanged by the prime minister and
the Alliance leader in their most recent debates. It really could go
either way on Sunday.

Members of the list might be interested in a longish article about the
election and the Swedish model in general that's in this week's Economist.
It's available free via the magazine's website
(economist.com/world/europe). The Economist's liberal view on things is,
as usual, fairly apparent; and there are a few slightly irritating factual
errors. But it's not a bad discussion.

2. For rather mysterious technical reasons, I'm having trouble updating
the group's website. But I can at least inform you via this message that I
have new co-ordinates (see below), effective from now.

Best,

Nick.
--
Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) in political science
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University College
SE-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
www.sh.se
nicholas.aylott@sh.se

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be
interested. To join the Scandinavian politics mailing list, send a message
to me, the convenor (nicholas.aylott@sh.se). If you want to send something
to the list, or if you don't want to receive these occasional messages,
just let me know. See also www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/scandinavia/

2006-09-07

Scandinavian Politics: more notices

Hej to all on the Scandinavian Politics list,

Two items.


1. PSA CONFERENCE 2007. It’s time once again for us to apply for panels at
the PSA’s annual conference (www.psa.ac.uk/2007), which next year will be
at the University of Bath on April 11th-13th.

The deadline for panel proposals is just a few weeks away, on September
30th, so send ideas for panels and individual papers to me as soon as you
can. We didn't manage to organise any panels last year, so let's make a
special effort this time. For those of you who haven't been to a PSA
conference before, I can say that the atmosphere is usually relaxed and
constructive, so no one should be apprehensive about presenting research,
even if the paper submitted is still work in progress. I could think of
presenting something along the lines of "Europe and party organisational
change", but it's very likely that we can accommodate papers with rather
different themes.

There will also be the chance for postgraduate students to receive a
modest subsidy for their travel costs and conference fees from our group's
funds. Anyone who's interested, or who can think or someone who might be
interested, should get in touch with me.


2. SWEDISH CAMPAIGN LATEST. As many will have heard, the hacking scandal
that blew up at the start of the week has definitely not fizzled out. The
chief hacker, the press secretary of the Liberals' youth wing, was
immediately sacked. But on Tuesday the national party's own press
secretary, who seems to have used information from the Social Democrats'
intranet to schedule Liberal policy initiatives, took a "time-out" (sic)
from her job after being questioned by the police. Then, just a few hours
later, the Liberal party secretary resigned, after he admitted knowing
about the intrusion way back in March. He'd apparently told the chief
hacker then that it had to stop. But he failed to make sure that it did
stop – and, worse, he lied on Monday about how much he'd known and when.
No one has yet suggested that the party leader, Lars Leijonborg, knew
anything about the instrusion until last Sunday. But he, too, failed to
come clean until Tuesday about how much the party secretary had known, and
Leijonborg's own position seemed thus to be crumbling. His questioning by
journalists on TV tonight, scheduled long ago, might be his last chance to
recover his standing.

Now, I wonder if the reaction to this political espionage has been
somewhat over the top. Everyone agrees that the Social Democrats' intranet
security was pathetically weak. But the hitherto embattled ruling party
has, of course, seized gleefully on the affair (and usually not as crassly
as the Social Democrats' own party secretary, who responded to Liberal
suggestions that they were overdoing their indignation by accusing
Leijonborg of acting "like a rapist who blames his victim"). The prime
minister, Göran Persson, has taken the opportunity to come over all grave
and statesmanlike. Certainly, although the scandal wasn't discussed, he
was in crushing form in last night's TV debate with Fredrik Reinfeldt, the
opposition Alliance's informal leader. Reinfeldt also gave a decent
account of himself. But there are already indications that Liberal support
will be hit hard by the scandal, and the Social Democrats clearly feel
that they now have every chance of retaining power.


Best,

Nick Aylott.

2006-09-05

Scandinavian Politics: elections

Hej to all on the Scandinavia Politics mailing list,

I have two notices about elections in this part of the world.


1. First, the Norwegian election of a year ago. The first report from the
Norwegian Election Studies group - Bernt Aaardal and Stavn Guro, "Enda
flere skifter parti" (www.ssb.no/samfunnsspeilet) - has now been published
by Statistics Norway. As the title suggests, it's in Norwegian. But one of
the authors, Bernt Aaardal, has also written a preliminary report in
English, "How to Lose a Walk-Over Election"
(www.samfunnsforskning.no/page/Publikasjoner/Publikasjoner_Rapporter/7457/29622.html),
based on exit polls and official statistics. (Thanks to Elin Haugsgjerd
Allern of the Institute for Social Research in Oslo for this tip.)


2. Meanwhile, with less than a fortnight to go before polling day, the
already exciting Swedish election campaign is becoming even more so. On
Sunday evening, in a scandal that one political scientist compared to
Watergate (which was perhaps just a slight exaggeration), it was revealed
that senior figures in the Liberal campaign had repeatedly gained access
to the Social Democrats' intranet, which contains sensitive information
about the Social Democrats' election strategy and tactics. The police have
raided the Liberals' central office, and prosecutions are likely. The
Liberal leader has deplored the intrusion, and the trespassers so far
revealed have all been from Liberal Youth. But it seems unlikely that they
kept their information entirely to themselves, and some Social Democrats'
have complained that Liberal campaign initiatives have been uncannily
well-timed to pre-empt those of the ruling party.

This scandal may just fizzle out, or it may help the Social Democrats to
recover in a campaign that has hitherto gone rather badly for them. After
pulling back the lead enjoyed by the four-party, centre-right "Alliance
for Sweden", the Social Democrats and their allies have - according to
most, but not all, opinion polls - slipped back again since the Alliance
agreed, some weeks ago, to abolish the current system of property tax.
(That agreement subsequently unravelled somewhat, but the lead in the
polls remained.)

The real possibility of a rare election defeat for the Social Democrats
might seem odd in the context of the vigorous growth of the Swedish
economy. But this growth has, at least until recently, been pretty much of
the jobless variety, and the Alliance has succeeded in placing
unemployment - which, when people on public retraining schemes are
counted, is about 9 per cent, and considerably higher among the young - at
the centre of the campaign. Indeed, some of the more outspoken Social
Democrats have criticised the response of the party leadership to the
Alliance's emphasis on unemployment, which has basically been to deny that
it's much of a problem.


Best,

Nick Aylott.

Please feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be
interested. To join the Scandinavian Politics mailing list, send a message
to me, the convenor (nicholas.aylott@pol.umu.se). If you want to send
something to the list, or if you don't want to receive these occasional
messages, just let me know. See also www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/scandinavia.

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