Autumn has arrived in Gothenburg after a long, warm summer. The placards for the traditional August concerts of local hero Håkan Hellström and of Rammstein, for which the Swedes have a curious weakness, have been exchanged for sober campaign posters; Sweden goes to the polls on September 11. In Sweden, the parties, which have to reach a 4 percent electoral threshold, prematurely confess to color and join either a left or a right bloc, one of which wins and within which the largest party supplies the prime minister. Incidentally, not all parties in that bloc also have to co-govern, as is now possible with the minority cabinet, formed exclusively by the Social Democrats of Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.
The Swedish block system provides an interesting dynamic and tension, which we have long been missing in the Netherlands due to the dominance of the VVD. The classic battle between the Social Democrats and the Moderates (a kind of VVD) has been disrupted for some time now by the rise of the right-wing nationalist Sweden Democrats, who are more moderate than the forty shades of brown that now populate the Dutch parliament.
The Sweden Democrats (SD) now seem to be getting bigger than the Moderates, but still well behind the Social Democrats. This means that the right faces a paradox and a dilemma; the more likely it becomes that the right-wing bloc lets the SD co-rule, the more moderate right-wing voters will switch to the left-wing bloc, because they despise the Sweden Democrats. With the Moderates’ somewhat bookish prime ministerial nominee, fears of an oversized SD appear to be triggering a last-minute flight of moderate voters to Prime Minister Andersson’s left-wing bloc.
As a Dutchman, it often feels as if Swedish politics is twenty years behind. At the beginning of July I was in Gotland during the Almedalsveckan, a week in which the entire Swedish social and political field comes together to exchange ideas. Fully publicly accessible, with hardly any security. Just when I concluded that this would absolutely no longer be possible in the Netherlands, the message came that the right-wing extremist Theodor Engström had murdered the forensic psychiatrist Ing-Marie Wieselgren a stone’s throw away. Later it turned out that he was also targeting Annie Lööf, the party leader of the less offensive Center Party, currently part of the left-wing bloc.
Immigration is the theme. The naivety and snideness still struck me after the huge influx of 2015, as if I was in the Netherlands before Fortuyn. But the Social Democrats have learned quickly and are now adopting a pragmatic tone that takes the wind out of SD’s sails. In any case, the mutual differences are not nearly as great as in the Netherlands, although the growing inequality also seems like a ticking time bomb in Sweden. Neoliberalism has even gone so far here that many schools have been privatized, and part of the education budgets ends up in the pockets of foreign shareholders as profit.
But what is particularly striking is that the rabid anti-government sentiment that plagues the Netherlands seems to be completely absent here. Sure, the SD has its roots in dubious clubs, but is economically left-wing and stands behind the strong Swedish welfare state. The conspiracy theory and revolutionary aggression of the alt-right are also missing; SD party leader Jimmy Åkesson would like to be fashionable and is more reminiscent of an opportunist like Joost Eerdmans than of Thierry Baudet. In Sweden the collective is still strong, in short, and the Social Democrats still seem to be ‘just’ the boss for the time being; a pleasant journey back in time for everyone who finds today’s Netherlands unbearable.