How Sweden’s Social Democrats survived in the capital of capital

Sweden’s election last Sunday turned out to be much more of a nail-biting affair than most had expected. While opinion polls showed a substantial lead for the opposition parties (consisting of the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Left and the Centre Party), the actual results made the race too close to call until all votes had been counted on Thursday. As the biggest opposition party, the Social Democrats now face the thankless task of forming a government that includes both the market-liberal Centre Party and the former communist party, the Left. While these parties are as far removed from each other as possible on economic issues, the only real unifying issue has been to get rid of the present government and make sure that the right-wing nationalists in the Sweden Democrats do not make it into a new cabinet. The negotiations are likely to be a nightmare as the Left has promised – unlike in all earlier elections – to only accept a government in which it is included, while the Centre Party has promised to not include the Left in a new government. A solution could be to leave the Left outside of government but make some kind of deal that would guarantee its support in parliament – similar to the Sweden Democrats’ confidence-and-supply arrangement of the last four years.

Two very different conclusions can be drawn regarding the Social Democrats’ status in Swedish politics. On the one hand it is a party that has been losing voters for three decades. Far away are the days when the party on its own could form a majority government, but as late as the early 1990s, it could still get over 45 per cent of the votes in national elections. Since then, the trend has been downwards and last Sunday marked another historic negative milestone as the party got 28.1 per cent of the votes – the worst result since the introduction of universal suffrage in Sweden in 1921.

The overall negative trend largely coincides not only with the shift from a goods-producing to a service-based economy but also with increasing competition from the hard right, which has managed to attract large parts of the party’s traditional voter base by capitalising on the segregating effects of generous migration and failed integration. The party has followed the same rough downward trend as other traditional centre-left parties in Europe. Political pundits close to the party blame Sunday’s result on bad election strategy: demonising the Sweden Democrats, an inability to communicate actual political proposals and over-reliance on well-known but personally uninspiring leading figures.

On the other hand, it is by a wide margin still the largest political party in Sweden and, unlike its sister parties in the Netherlands and France, it has not collapsed or merged into new centre-left constellations. Given the country’s multiparty system, with a total of eight parties in parliament, the more interesting question is therefore how the party still manages to attract almost one in every three votes. There are at least three reasons.

First, the Social Democrats hold a unique position in Swedish society. No, it cannot dominate local communities as it did during the Cold War era with a network of affiliated organisations that included youth clubs, education associations, an insurance company, a travel agency, an advertising agency, and nationwide chains of petrol stations, food shops and even a funeral home. Parts of this network, or ‘movement’ as Swedes call it, still exist. The connection to the unions (both white- and blue-collar, but especially the latter) remains important through financial contributions and the ability to call on large swathes of campaign workers during elections. As was the case in the late 19th century, the party remains the Trade Union Confederation’s political wing. In addition, the party still has close ties to important interest groups such as the Tenants’ Association (which to this day negotiates rents collectively at the national level) and the largest pensioners’ organisation in the country.

Second, although it has lost parts of its traditional voting base to the hard right, it has instead attracted new voters among migrant communities in many of Sweden’s ethnically segregated suburbs. In this election, voter mobilisation increased substantially in areas like these and the party got 37 per cent of the votes among those with a non-European background. Together with the Left, it won an astounding 58 per cent within this demographic. Unsurprisingly, one of the post-election debates in the Swedish commentariat now concerns whether the ‘Muslim vote’ actually tipped the election in favour of the opposition.

Third, and most importantly, since the 1980s the party has by and large chosen pragmatism and a will to rule over radicalism. After its last real attempt at socialism – the failed and eventually half-baked attempt to let the unions take control over Swedish industry with so-called wage-earner funds – the party has become much more centrist. In the 1980s, the party initiated public-sector deregulation and the many market-oriented reforms implemented by a centre-right government in the 1990s were not reversed. Since then, governments of both stripes have continued to lower taxes and improve the business climate. Sweden now has more dollar billionaires per capita than the United States and according to The Economist, Stockholm is Europe’s ‘capital of capital’. It was also the Social Democrats who initiated the processes of getting Sweden into both the EU and NATO and it has – belatedly, its critics would argue – come around to a much harder line on migration and criminality. Sceptical of the Left Party’s economic populism, its communist past (and, lately, antisemitic tendencies), it has historically refused to share government power with it, instead relying on tacit support, knowing that the hard left would hardly cooperate with the right. In the more recent culture war over identity politics it has, with some notable exceptions, stayed clear of the most extreme versions of wokeness. The pragmatic approach, in combination with the party’s will to be in power rather than in opposition, also led it to remain in government between 2014 and 2022, while only managing to get three left-wing budgets through parliament and instead being forced to rule on right-wing budgets.

The party now faces what is likely to be its most difficult task since handling Sweden’s financial crisis of the early 1990s: to secure a strong enough government that can get its budget through parliament while at the same time accommodating both populist leftists and economic neoliberals. This is likely to take a long time and will require all the pragmatism and negotiation skill the party can muster. Should this fail, options include courting the smaller parties on the right, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, to cooperate in a coalition government. Simultaneously, the current Prime Minister, Ulf Kristersson of the Moderate Party, will likely try to convince the Centre Party to come back to the right-wing camp (an equally daunting task given that party’s promise to never cooperate with the Sweden Democrats). Regardless of who eventually wins this complicated tug-of-war, centrist pragmatists of both right and left will continue to rule in Sweden.