This article was first published in Stockholm News 2009-04-24:
The voters abandon the Social Democrats and the support for the two blocs is now totally equal according to an opinion poll from Synovete that is published in Dagens Nyheter today. Just six months ago the left bloc was almost twenty percentage points ahead of the right. Why is this?
One reason is probably the AMF pension scandal. Another is the uncertainties about the outcome of the negotiations between the three parties in the left bloc. A third explantion is that people seem to approve of the way in which the center right government is dealing with the financial crisis so far.
The government has claimed that the opposition promise new costly projects and reforms almost every day and that their programme would lead to much worse public finances. The government on the other hand try to look like the responsible part who considers that the crisis may go on for quit a time and therefore don´t spend too much money. Even they have however had to face a budget deficit of historical proportion.
I believe that differences in the confidence in persons is one major reason for the shift in opinion. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and Minister for Finance Anders Borg have created an image of statemanship while Mona Sahlin struggles with shrinking personal support both within her party and among voters.
Can she win the voters´ trust. Photo: Magnus Selander
The image of Sahlin as a political leader was damaged last autumn when she first excluded the Left Party from the negotiations about their alternative to the government. She wanted to proceed with just the Greens. After protests from the left of her own party, she changed her mind. Everything went on in public.
Many middle class voters who are worried about the economy do not trust neither the Left party, nor the Greens. In the past the Social Democrats could cooperate with them without letting them in to the government. This is not possible anymore since they now have demanded minister portfolios to support any government.
The current government has however also problems. They won the last election in 2006 on the job issue; their most important promise was to reduce the number of people, who didn´t have a job. Even though no one could foresee this international crisis, it will be a tough election campaign for them in 2010 if the unemployment continuous to go up. If we have passed the bottom of the crisis and people see the light in the tunnel they can on the other hand say that their way of handling with the crisis turned out to work while the opposition´s costly promises would have made it worse.
According to the poll from Synovete, a large part of the loss for the Social Democrats is however not to other parties, but to the group who say they will not vote at all. One shall also not forget that even though the opposition has lost twenty percentage points on the government in six months, there is still equal support between the blocs. Anything can happen on September 19, 2010.
The Christian Democrats (KD) and the Sweden Democrats (SD) would not get any seats in the parliament according to the poll. KD is one of the parties in the government and it is a possible outcome that the government gets more voters than the opposition but that the latter gets more seats in Riksdagen due to KD falling out.
I believe however that KD will get support from ‘brother four percent’, supporters of the government who vote for them just to keep them in parliament. The same behavior saved the former communist party, now Vänsterpartiet (Left party), in Riksdagen for decades when Social Democrats voted for them to save the power to their own party.
The Pirate Party would get one percent according to the poll. They have got more attention than ever after the trial against the Pirate Bay.
