Tommie Ullman

This article was first published in Stockholm News 2008-06-15:

Opinion polls show that the nationalistic party Sverigedemokraterna (SD) might get seats in the parliament, Riksdagen, after the next election. In a poll published in Svenska dagbladet today, they get 4.2 percent. Four percent is required to be represented in the parliament.

If this happens, and if neither the left or right coalition gets a majority of the seats, there will be a very difficult, but also interesting, situation.

The parliamentary political landscape in Sweden is divided into two halves. There is one centre-right coalition that now forms the government. It consists of theModerate party (conservative / right wing liberal), Folkpartiet (traditionally left wing liberal), Centerpartiet (former farmers´ party) and the Christian Democrats. On the other side is the red-green alliance with the Social democrats, the Greens and the Left party (former communists). There have been coalitions over the border between these two so called “political blocks” but they have been rare and in general these two alternatives to form the government have been running against each other in every election.

Things might however change after next election in September 2010. If SD gets seats in Riksdagen the old political logic will not apply. SD is generally considered pariah in Swedish politics. Even if they now claim to have been getting rid of anti democratic persons and xenophobic parts of their program, the other parties still see them as nationalistic, racist and xenophobic. It will be very difficult for any party on the national level to co-operate with them in an organised way. All the established parties will also force promises from each other before the election not to cooperate with them. On the other hand side, the country must have a government. So, if SD reaches Riksdagen and get a weigher position, I can see four possible outcomes.

1) SD manage to use their weigher position and, without actually being part of any government, secretly negotiate with one of the political sides and give them passive support in the parliament. I do not believe this will happen. No one wants to give legitimacy to SD and after all hash words against them that will be said during the election campaign, it would be very difficult to do u-turn afterwards.

2) A coalition between the Social democrats and one or two of the parties in the centre, i.e. Folkpartiet and / or Centerpartiet. There have been discussions about this in the past. The social democrats formed a coalition with Centerpartiet in the 50ies and cooperated with them in the 90ies. The former Prime Minister Göran Persson writes in his autobiography that he regrets not trying to form a coalition with the Centre party then. After the 1994 election there were speculations about a coalition between the Social democrats and Folkpartiet.

However, both these parties now have leaderships that have positioned themselves as very “anti social democratic”. In many ways they have moved clearly to the right compared to in the 90ies. If this coalition is not announced before the election, which is highly unlikely, they won’t have the mandate from their voters to jump over to a new coalition with “the other side”. This is not a likely scenario neither from a politically nor tactically point of view for these parties.

3) The centre-right alliance forms a majority with the Greens, provided they collect more than fifty percent of the voters together. This will be very difficult. Especially the Moderate party and the Greens have different views on the environment, the public insurance system, the European cooperation, the school system and labour market. Just to mention a few areas where there will be problems. These differences to some extent also exist between the Greens and the other parties in the present government but they are especially deep between the Moderate party and the Greens. Not least on a mental level, these two parties would have very difficult to find themselves in a coalition with each other.

_{Jan Björklund, Folkpartiet (photo: Pawel flato) and Maria Wetterstrand, the Greens (Photo: Riksdagen). Can they govern together?}

4) A coalition with the Greens and the centre right coalition excluding the Moderate party. This alliance was very close to come to reality after the 2002 election when the Greens wanted to try an alternative to cooperate with the Social democratic government.

This could be a reality but the government would need support from either the Moderate party or the Social democrats. The key question is if the two big parties sees no other realistic government and therefore may accept to support this “Centre-Green” coalition. The survival of such a government would then depend on the skills of the Prime minister when it comes to first keep the government itself together, a task difficult enough, and then get their program through in parliament by support from alternatively the Moderate party or the Social democrats.

Of course the situation could be different if for example, one or two of the present parties fails to collects the necessary four percent but to make it possible to get an overview of the Swedish political landscape I disregard from that possibility here.

Two years remains until the election and a lot of things can change. This is just some speculations on what might happen. After all; it is more likely that one of the two ordinary alternatives reach a majority of the voters.