Sweden’s first African-American Prime Minister and other scattered election notes
The Swedish folkhemmet (The Folk Home) has deliberately been financed through broadbased taxes as a way to obscure the true cost of the welfare state, but as the system has grown increasingly expensive, more and more use-fees have been added to the mix. Sweden’s capital Stockholm introduced toll roads after the 2002 election, euphemistically referred to as “congestion fees,” as an easy and environmentally correct way to fleece auto commuters. A non-binding referendum was held last Sunday, and, unsurprisingly, voters who live in Stockholm supported the fees while voters in neighboring towns rejected them by an overwhelming majority. It will be a tough nut to crack for the center-right coalition parties.
The leader of the Communist party gave a liberal columnist the finger during a television program the morning after the election. She responded by calling him “a brutal, poorly raised commie.” Click for picture.
The great-great-grandfather of Sweden’s soon-to-be Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was an American mulatto who impregnated a Latvian maid while visiting Sweden. I assume NAACP will invite Sweden’s first African-American Prime Minister to speak at its annual meeting.
Several Social Democratic female activists are of the opinion that the party’s next leader must be a woman. How convenient.
The Social Democrats have never had a woman as leader, although it was widely believed that Anna Lindh would have succeeded the now resigning Göran Persson had she not been murdered by a Serb nationalist.
Eurocrat Margot Wallström is seen as one of the leading candidates to replace Mr. Persson. Her’s is a name that should send shivers down the spine of EU observers.
We distort, you decipher! Here’s an actual question directed at a local chairman of the immigration-restrictionist - but otherwise pretty bland - Sweden Democrats who captured a whopping 22% of the votes in Landskrona, a town somewhere in Sweden:
Why do you think Landskronians voted for a racist party?
And, really, when did you stop torturing little kittens?
Göran Persson was Sweden’s Prime Minister for 12 years. He’s quite similar to Boston’s mayor Tom Menino in that he’s a fixer rather than a thinker, a trait that served him well when he sorted out the government’s messy fiscal situation in the mid 1990’s, but one that also became more and more of a liability as it became increasingly clear that he had no vision other than winning the next election. He wasn’t helped by his domineering and pompous personality, and I say that even though I’ve seen but a fraction of what Swedish voters have seen of him over the past several years. He won’t be missed, not even by his own party, I dare say, but he does deserve respect for bringing the nation out of a financial abyss.
It’s fashionable among leftists to label everybody to the right of themselves as Nazis. That’s offensive, but more importantly unfortunate since there actually are real, living, breathing Nazis out there who shouldn’t get the benefit of laboring in an environment where the meaning of “Nazi” is muddled. In a town in western Sweden the National Socialist Front managed to get 0.6% of the vote, their best showing anywhere. It’s pretty crazy that 1 out of every 200 voter in a town is a Nazi. A real Nazi, not a Soup Nazi or Parking Nazi or Whatever Nazi but a real bleeping Nazi. Yikes. On the other hand, at their very strongest, that’s all they are. 1 out of 200. The numbers are not in their favor, one could say.
The Communists, by the way, captured 5.8% of the national vote. That’s pretty insane, too.
The Social Democrats suffered great losses most everywhere, but they and the Communists scored a combined 65% (and usually 75%) or better in the immigrant-heavy wards in Rinkeby and Tensta in Stockholm. There was no ward that I know of with a large concentration of immigrants that came even close to giving the center-right parties similar levels of support. Rule of thumb 1: The vast majority of immigrants are socialists or communists. Rule of thumb 2: Non-socialist parties are severely hurt by immigration.
There may yet be more center-left than center-right voters in Sweden. As many as 5.7% of votes were cast for “Other parties” (including the above mentioned Sweden Democrats and National Socialist Front), most of which likely came from digruntled Communists and, in particular, Social Democrats. Of course, some of those former Social Democrats may have picked SD as a way to transition away from the Social Democrats. Swedes are overwhelmingly class voters and it’s probably very difficult for many middle-aged and retired Social Democratic voters to switch to the bourgeois coalition parties after a lifetime of voting for the “Sosies” (yes, that’s my inspired translation of sossarna). It could also be that many of them will return to the fold in 2010, the way they did in 1994, after voting for the populist New Democracy in 1991.
The Social Democrats lost in part because they couldn’t balance the competing demands between two of its core constituences: The working class and the idling class. The non-socialist parties courted working class voters and especially the Moderates dramatically scaled back their pro-market rhetoric, de-regulation proposals and tax-cut plans. Convinced that the non-socialists aren’t about to launch dramatic “steel-bath reforms” - as pro-market jargon had it in the early 1990’s - enough swing voters (of which Sweden has rather few) decided to give them a shot at governing the country.
The incoming center-right government thus faces the difficult challenge of boosting job creation without markedly reducing job security. I think it can be done, but it will be tricky and if consumer demand slumps in America, there’ll be little chance of substantially more jobs in Sweden.
