Rightist Party in Sweden Gets No Formal Role but Big Say in Government, Will Be “Minister of Everything”
Sweden’s new prime minister, Stefan Lofven, has announced that the Social Democrats and Greens will be “ministers of everything” and that he has no intention of forming a government, although the parties have “indicated a willingness to compromise”.
This story will be updated as information becomes available.
Social democrat (SDP) leader, Anders Ygeman, reacted in a press conference in Stockholm, stating that he has no intention of sitting in a coalition government with the conservative Moderate Party, the liberal Bloc for the Alliance and the Green Party.
This is a good thing. It is an indication of how far the country has now strayed from a social democrat vision of its future.
In the 1980s, parties like the Social Democrats were seen as the only option for the Social Democracy Party. The Social Democratic Party had come out from under the yoke of the communist party led by the Soviet Union and, by some accounts, had won the elections in the 1980s with only a few seats in the parliament.
Things were looking up for Social Democracy in the 1980s, but in the 1990s, social democracy was faced with a huge challenge in the form of the Greens. The Greens came to the fore in the nineties as party of “the people” and had come to dominate the national council elections.
Social Democracy, meanwhile, had stagnated and the party had become very weak, with a large number of parliamentarians at the fringes. They had become a very small minority party, which had almost no influence on the national assembly in itself or in any other place.
The Greens had broken away from the party system in the sixties, and had a vision that did not fall under the umbrella of social democracy. The Greens had seen power in the workplace and had built a huge movement to challenge capitalism.
Social democracy was caught out by the Greens and the movement they led. Social Democracy had been on the wrong track from the beginning. It got into fights with social democracy for control over large parts of state industry and they ended up in the same alliance with the Social Democrats.
For an insight into how and why the Social Democrats were taken in, read this excellent article.
The current Swedish Social Democratic Labor Party is now seen by