This text was originally part of Stockholm News weekly e-newsletter Sunday the 18th of December 2011.
Christmas is here. Time for relaxation, meeting the family, eating a lot of food, giving- and receiving christmas gifts and perhaps watching some traditional TV-programs. (Sweden has some peculiar christmas traditions. Donald Duck on TV on Christams Eve must be considered one of them).
Or perhaps Christmas is the time to stress. For many people this is unfortunally the case. Christmas is of course also a Christian holiday for many peole, even though secularisation is widespread and many (most?) people in Sweden put focus on other aspects of this holiday.
Stockholm News-letter will take a break over Christmas and New Year and be back on Sunday January 8.
The political year
Since this is the last newsletter for the year, it might be time to summarize the political year in Sweden.
The year has been characterized by a minority government which do lose some votings in the Riksdag but generally manage to run the country the way they want. One reason is a weak and divided opposition.
It is weak because the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, is in their deepest crisis for a very long time, perhaps since they started in 1889. Stockholm News has written a lot about it both on the site and in previous newsletters. The Left Party is in the middle of a process to change leaders and has lost voters in every election for the last ten years. The Greens and the Sweden Democrats are the two opposition parties which are optimistic and confident about the future but they only have 12 % of the seats in the Riksdag together are they would never cooperate with each other.
Of course, if the opposition was not divided, they would topple the government and form a new government since they have a majority but his will not happen. The formerly nationalist, now social conservative, party the Sweden Democrats is still pariah. Their roots in the extreme nationalist movements of the late 1980s are still hard to forget for most other parties even though they are a different party today.
But also the former red-green alliance which challenged the center-right government in the last election has been dissolved. The opposition mostly functions as four independent parties. It seems like the government will be able to continue like the past year, governing in minority and get support from at least one of the other parties in different issues and every now and then lose a voting.
The government on their side has been accused of lacking ideas. Crisis management and ’taking responsibility’ is their major focus. This is especially true for the Moderate party, which leads the government. The three smaller centre-right parties are more ideological. The Moderates has however turned pragmatism into their ideology. Prime Minister Reinfeldt said earlier this year something like this: ”Some people ask for visions. I want to warn for that”. In his eyes, visions are potentially dangerous and changes should be made in small steps and in a pragmatic way. Personally I have understanding for this approach. ”If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” is an old saying. I do not believe there is any widespread demand for new political ”visions” or radical changes in Sweden at the moment.
So, the next political year in Sweden will probably be slow when it comes to actual political changes but perhaps dramatic when it comes to the political game; who will support who and will the government lose any important votings?
Annus terriblis for the King
It was a bad year for the political opposition it was also a bad year for the monarchy. A majority of the Swedish population is still for the constitutional monarchy that Sweden has today but the confidence in the King has been severely damaged after the scandals. Some people also start to question the fact that the King cannot be prosecuted and cannot be dismissed (unless he changes faith, which would actually be a reason to dismiss him. The Swedish King needs to be of the “pure Lutheran faith”. This might seem a bit odd in 2011 in one of the world’s most secularized countries).
