Sweden's long-dominant Social Democratic Party will be hoping desperately that the appointment of a new leader, Stefan Löfven, last Friday marks the end of probably worst fortnight in the party's 123-year history. After needing just seven party leaders until 2007, it now has its third in a year.
Very briefly, the background is this. After she lost the 2010 election rather badly, a slow-motion revolt forced Mona Sahlin to resign from the Social Democratic leadership. Ten months ago, the party chose an outsider, Håkan Juholt, as her successor.
Juholt was a disaster. There was soon scandal over excessive accommodation-allowance claims. Worse was his inability to maintain coherent and consistent policy positions. Still worse was his management of Social Democrats' parliamentary group. The last straw was when, apparently rejuvenated after a month-long Christmas holiday in Mexico, Juholt appeared at an annual defence-policy conference and performed his usual trick of saying things that he then had to recant quickly. That seemed to persuade a lot of Social Democrats that things were not going to get better.
Even then, Juholt wanted to stay. But when, on January 20th, three regional branches demanded his resignation, it was finally too much. According to media reports, three members of the executive committee still backed him. Nine wanted him to go.
Then the saga became even more bizarre.
From odd to odderThe party's secretary-general, Carin Jämtin, explained on television that same Friday evening that the executive had full confidence in Juholt. Almost immediately, it became clear that she meant: "...because he has agreed to resign tomorrow". The next day he duly announced his departure - at a press conference held in a shopping mall in his home town. The secretary-general then declared, with a straight face, that his resignation had not been expected by the executive.
Except for one columnist in the left-leaning newspaper
Aftonbladet, no one seems to have taken any great offence at being so blatantly lied to. (I suppose that everyone soon knew what was happening, and Jämtin obviously understood that they would.) Indeed, Jämtin's reputation has been enhanced during the crisis. The reasoning seems to have been that, if Juholt pretended to go of his own volition, the intra-party recriminations would be somehow reduced.
If anything, the next few days were even worse for the party. Fairly credible newspaper reports suggested that the executive committee, meeting in almost round-the-clock session, offered the leadership to one, two or even three former Social Democratic ministers, none of whom had been party-politically active for at least five years. Their merits seemed to be, first, their experience and, second, their lack of involvement in the poisonous personal and ideological battles that surrounded the appointments and removals of Sahlin and Juholt. In other words, and if you believe the papers, the Social Democrats - for decades Sweden's natural party of government - were actively seeking a leader with no known views on the most contentious political issues of the day. This felt like a surreal situation.
In that context, Löfven's appointment may seem like a welcome step back towards political reality. True, he backed Juholt until the end, according to the papers. That might indicate poor political judgement. It might also indicate brilliant political judgement. Juholt's supporters, some of whom have been blaming the media for his fall, can have nothing against Löfven now.
The new leaderInternal party feuds aside, Löfven is widely respected, both within the labour movement and beyond it. He has a reputation for intelligence, competence and pragmatism. In his acceptance speech, he emphasised above all the need for a credible Social Democratic policy on employment, the absence of which has been glaring for years - with dire electoral consequences.
Still, he is - or was - hardly a household name. Indeed, he is entirely untried in frontline politics. In praising the speech in which Löfven accepted the party leadership, a Social Democratic MP and party-board member conceded that he had never heard the new leader speak publicly before.
Löfven has the serious disadvantage of not being an MP. Parliamentary debates will have to be someone else's responsibility. His trade-union background - until now, he was leader of the metalworkers union - may not immediately appeal to the prosperous urban voters whom the Social Democrats desperately need to recover. As for his policy views, he is not known as much of a feminist (although he tried to scotch that reputation in his acceptance speech), and he is for nuclear power and European integration. That puts him at odds with the other left-of-centre parties, the Left and the Greens. Their new leaders, who have made strong starts, may see Löfven as someone they can take even more votes off. His positions on other central issues are opaque.
Perhaps above all, Löfven has a big weakness. Irrespective of where he wants to take the Social Democrats, he has no mandate to do it. This is because of the way he got the job. I think it illuminates a big part of how the party ended up in such a chaotic state.
Delegation, or the absence of itSwedish organisations, including political parties, have a funny way of appointing people to leadership positions. Open competition between candidates is often frowned upon. Instead, a selection committee receives nominations, sounds out the constituency and eventually nominates a single candidate. The Social Democrats take this custom a step further. There remains a taboo against anyone actually expressing leadership ambitions. Instead, you are supposed to deny interest until the selection committee asks you. The actual election, by congress delegates, is then just a rubber stamp.
This norm has presumably evolved in order to maintain the subordination of personal ambition to the collective interest of the party and the labour movement. Yet such was the total failure of the procedure last time that there were widespread calls - within the party (especially in the youth wing), in the media and among academic commentators - for a more open process, with candidates presenting their platforms and a congress choosing between them. Three other Swedish parties have recently adopted exactly this procedure, albeit still with an election committee that eventually recommended one candidate. This weekend, the Christian Democrats' leader saw off an open challenge at a special party congress - a highly unusual event in Swedish politics.
The Social Democratic leadership, however, ignored calls for more openness (although Jämtin stated that she would ideally have preferred such a path, and pledged an inquiry into how this might be achieved in the future). For reasons that are by no means obvious, given that the next parliamentary election is not much less than three years away, it insisted that a new leader be found as quickly as possible. Its sense of urgency was apparently shared by most of the party's regional branches, whose enduring power within the organisation is illuminated during the selection of the party leader. Perhaps the leaderships of those regional branches were aware that their power would diminish if the process was conducted via competition rather than negotiation.
Whatever the motives of those involved, the executive committee quickly decided that it would nominate an acting leader for approval by the party board. That person would then be confirmed by the next ordinary party congress in 2013. There would be no special congress, nor even any selection committee.
There are various normative objections to this closed, elitest selection mechanism. Whatever your views on that, the bigger problem with it may be that it is ineffective in promoting the party's electoral objectives. The Social Democrats' underlying weakness has for years been a lack of ideas. Its failure to address employment policy is only the most visible aspect of this stagnation.
Regardless of whether Löfven, entirely untried as a politician, has the personal qualities that his predecessor lacked, his mandate for now is simply to unite the party. As far as policy is concerned, it remains unclear what the party and its new leader actually want, or even if they know what they want.
Nicholas Aylott
School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University, Stockholm
www.sh.se/nicholasaylott
