The conservative bloc could unseat the social democrat Andersson from the government
The morning of the elections, the Swedes woke up yesterday with the news of a multiple rape of a 20-year-old girl in the center of Sundsvall, in a pedestrian area that is usually very crowded on any Saturday night. It is a type of violent act that the Swedes have had to get used to in recent years, such as shootouts between drug gangs with a migration background.
This reality, so far from the perfect Swedish welfare state, together with the Russian threat, have undoubtedly weighed on the electoral result. The far-right Sweden Democrats (SD) party has won the surprise over the center-right Moderate Party, and has become the second most voted Swedish political formation.
The firm hand against crime and the priority of Defense policies have benefited its leader, Jimmie Åkesson, who also maintains a relatively skeptical position towards the European Union and who has won 20.5% of the votes. While waiting for the recount to progress, the Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson, who in her first legislature has taken the historic step of requesting Sweden’s accession to NATO and who has obtained 29% of the votes, could not lead the government not even forming a bloc that brings together the entire Swedish left.
At the close of this edition, this hypothetical coalition would obtain 173 seats, while the conservative bloc and the extreme right could gather 176. Despite this, the big loser of the day is the Moderate Party, which with only 16% of the ballots loses political relevance and ceases to be the benchmark for the conservative vote.
“Queues are still long at some polling stations and some have needed to stay open beyond the closing time of the polls, so it may take a little longer to count,” explained Anna Nyqvist, permanent secretary of the Authority last night. election, after knowing the exit polls and after deciding that all voters who were already in the queue at 8:00 p.m. could cast their vote. On these fragile percentages, the public television SVRT calculated at the close of the polls a government in the hands of the leftist bloc, in which Andersson managed to involve the greens, the center and the leftist party, despite the obvious difficulties.
The centrist leader Annie Lööf has, for the first time this campaign, opened up to forming a government with the Social Democrats, but only if the Left Party is not also included, which is made ugly by its rejection of NATO and its links with related Kurdish movements. with terrorism. The former communist Nooshi Dadgostar, for her part, has shown her reluctance to sit down and talk with Lööf. The recount, however, gave an advantage as it advanced to the conservative bloc, in which there would also be very significant cracks when it came to forming a government.
Conservatives and Christian Democrats have broken for the first time in this electoral campaign the cordon sanitaire that excluded SD from any government for the last two decades and has shown a willingness to govern with Åkesson, which opens the door to an unprecedented and hypothetical coalition that will also has major pitfalls. The main focus of tension would undoubtedly arise between the hard wing of the SD and the Liberals, who only a year ago governed with the Social Democrats. In the final phase of the campaign, in one of the last acts, the liberal leader refused to travel by bus with the rest of the formations and organized a transfer at his own expense to avoid coinciding in the same vehicle with members of the Sweden Democrats .
Regardless of whether one bloc or the other holds the narrow advantage once the count is over, the Scandinavian country is likely to face a lengthy government formation, as it did after the 2018 elections. Andersson said last night that she is willing to work with all parties except the Sweden Democrats and was ‘very disappointed’ that ‘other parties have decided differently on this’. Regarding what will most immediately affect the rest of Europe, one of the big differences between the two blocs is energy policy.
The left-wing bloc is committed to renewables in the medium term, while the opposition defends the construction of new nuclear reactors with generous public subsidies. Sweden ended the nuclear moratorium in 2010, but provided that the total number of reactors did not exceed the ten then active and no new ones were built. Since then, energy companies have closed four reactors for lack of profitability and the opposition blames the government for betting on “less stable” energy such as wind power.
Jimmie Akesson, a controversial leader
His first steps in politics were with the center-right Moderate Party, after studying Political Science at Lund University. But his work as a web designer for the British Medical Journal Aktiv company, co-founded by the general secretary of the SD, drew him towards the radical formation. His impeccable hairstyle, glasses and clean shave whitewash his efforts to turn a fringe anti-foreigner movement (‘Keep Sewden Sweidish’) into an alternative government. He entered Parliament in 2010 with 5.7%, after an omnipresent campaign that took its toll. In 2014 he admitted his addiction to online gambling and took six months off to detox. On occasion he has declared that Muslims are “the greatest foreign threat since World War II.”
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