Dear all on the Scandinavian Politics list,
It's official: the next leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party will be Mona Sahlin. As became clear yesterday, she will be the only candidate for the post when, in March, a special party congress chooses – or, in practice, rubber stamps – the new chair of the party organisation.
So much could be written about this development, but I'll restrict myself to raising briefly a few aspects.
Sahlin will be the party's first woman leader in its nearly 120 years of existence. She is only the second to be chosen in opposition; all her predecessors have been prime minister at some stage. On a personal level, her designation represents an extraordinary political comeback, after she withdrew from leadership contention in 1996 after her chaotic personal finances (minor misuse of government credit cards, unpaid bills and parking fines) came to light.
For me, most fascinating has been the Social Democrats' method of choosing its leader. The other day the Moderate prime minister, Fredrick Reinfeldt, mentioned that it seemed to have had two basic criteria: first, that none of the contenders should say anything about politics; and, second, that none of them should be a man. He called the whole process "very strange"; and, in some ways, it is. Until the 1960s the British Conservative Party leader used to "emerge" rather than be elected, a system that everyone now regards as archaic. But that is pretty much how Sahlin has been chosen. She has "emerged" as potential rivals have backed out, which in most cases they did as they realised that Sahlin was going to "emerge" in front of them.
At the heart of the process has been a very Swedish institution, the "election committee" (valbereddning). In many organisations (including university departments), there is no really open campaign between candidates to a leadership or representative position. Instead, the election committee sounds out the constituency and eventually proposes a candidate (or slate of candidates) that it feels has the best chance of achieving the broadest support – which is what the Social Democrats' election committee did yesterday. The final vote in that constituency is thus often – though not always – a confirmation of this perception, as the election committee's preferred candidate is the only one who thinks it worth standing.
Strange this may be to some, but there is a point to it. As the chair of the Social Democrats' election committee argued, more open competition between candidates is a recipe for factional infighting in a political party. Social Democrats can now rally round Sahlin and pretend that they supported her all along. The process also allowed the party's women's league, early on, to insist that the new leader be a woman, and thus implicitly to threaten an internal explosion if the election committee didn't propose one.
So, while everyone expects her leadership style to be more collegial than that of her predecessor, no one really knows where Sahlin will lead the party policy-wise. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as a young MP and then a young minister, she acquired the reputation of belonging to the right of the party, which is the main reason why she is deeply distrusted by many on the Social Democrats' left, especially trade-union activists. (The revelation today that she went 11 years without being a member of a union, and only joined one last December, will not help her.) Since her ministerial comeback in 1998, she has, as far as I can recall, said pretty much nothing about economic or, especially, labour market issues. But she has taken some pretty radical positions on social issues like equality of the sexes and the integration of immigrants.
Best,
Nick Aylott.
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Dr Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer (docent) in political science
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University College
SE-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
www.sh.se/statsvetenskap
