Old Hat, New Hat: What direction did Sweden's Social Democrats set?

Local Sweden

2 days ago

The Local's Nordic Editor Richard Orange surveys the Social Democrat party congress over the weekend and argues that the party swung neither to the left nor to the right, and that while it was not "totally new", it didn't stay exactly the same either.
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The children's classic "Old Hat New Hat", in which a genial but down-at-heel bear tries on a dizzying variety of hats to the growing rage of a salesman, is burned into my brain. I must have read it to my children a hundred times.
So it popped unprompted into my head when I was surveying the reaction to the Social Democrats' Congress in Gothenburg.
Did the five days mark the launch of a renewed party which can bring "a new direction for Sweden", as the party's leader Magdalena Andersson promised no fewer than seven times in her speech (new hat). Or was it, as Expressen's commentator Viktor Barth-Kron argued, "in many ways a manifestation of the opposite" (old hat).
Did it mark, as Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson argued, "a dangerous swing to the left"? (too lumpy?)
Or did it instead show the party swinging so far towards the Sweden Democrats on crime and immigration that, as Daniel Suhonen, leader of the party's left-wing Reformisterna faction, complained in an Aftonbladet podcast, it was "too close" to the populist party (too shiny?).
It's hard to take these verdicts entirely seriously.
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The most left-wing proposals brought to the conference – that the party legislate to cut the working week to 35 hours by 2035, that it bring in a property tax, fastighetsskatt, and that it abandon fiscal discipline to enable a debt-funded infrastructure splurge – were all largely neutralised by the party leadership.
While the party backed shorter working times in principle, it said this should for now be left to unions and employers to negotiate. The property tax was rejected flat out.
The party proposed a "loan-financed total defence fund", which will help "ramp up military and civil defence at a breakneck pace", but its financial spokesperson Mikael Damberg held a speech extolling the benefits of fiscal discipline.
There were some concrete left-wing reforms which were decided on, however, such as ending the system where workers forgo benefits for their first day off sick, bringing in the same sort of "high cost protection" for dental care as there is for other healthcare, and a promise to look into "increased tax on capital incomes". The party also voted to "ban profit extraction from preschool, school, and upper secondary schools".
The accusation of "sounding like the Sweden Democrats" is a little more credible. The biggest new crime proposal, the anti-mafia law, was pinched from the far-right party, which proposed it back in 2011. The party also voted for a proposal that Sweden's asylum regime to be "as strict as possible under EU law", a formulation taken straight from the far-right party.
But the Social Democrats have been moving towards a stricter policy on crime and migration for nearly a decade, so this is hardly new, and in her speech Andersson still claimed to be holding the line against racism.
"We should have a strict migration policy in Sweden, and a demand-based integration policy," she declared. "But racism, division and suspicion of others? No, never. That's not Sweden. In our country, in our home, we stick together!"
More liberal voices on immigration tried to change the language on immigration from "strict" to "sustainable", and in the end a compromise "strict and sustainable" was voted through. Rather than "left" or "right", the party is still very much in the middle.
One hat that Magdalena Andersson was certainly trying on was the one she lost in 2022, the prime minister's hat. Rather than addressing the delegates in front of her, she sought "instead to direct myself to the Swedish people", in a kind of "speech to the nation", so beloved of the current prime minister, Ulf Kristersson.
She began by harking back to the most intense moment she had when she was prime minister in 2022: receiving a call at midnight from Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, just 12 hours after Russia's invasion.
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She barely touched on any of the policy decisions being made at the congress, with Andersson instead making three pledges to the Swedish people: that she and her party would "protect Sweden's external and internal security", that it would bring a "tangible increase in prosperity", and that it would bring in measures to "increase social cohesion".
Then there was the nationalist hat. Andersson said the word "Sweden" no fewer than 46 times in her speech. The decisions taken over the weekend were not ultimately just about the party, she said, but "about Sweden".
At a time when the election of Donald Trump and invasion of Ukraine has changed everything, she argued, the current government was "stuck in a complicated agreement that is an answer to yesterday's issues, yesterday's conflicts and old solutions".
The fact that the government is prioritising tax breaks for those with the highest incomes, is, she said, "not just unfair politics, but also inefficient countercyclical policy".
"I'm sorry, but it's actually just stone cold stupid," she said, in one of her few direct attacks on the government.
The repeated use of the word säkerhet, meaning security, was, the journalist Jona Sima argued on Aftonbladet's Åsiktskorridoren podcast, a veiled attack on the government, given how the first national security advisor the government appointed resigned after losing classified documents, and the second over explicit pictures he shared on a hook-up app.
With the right leadership (hers), Andersson argued, Sweden could do better. "We have done it before. This country, and all of us who live here. We have taken ourselves through tough times before. Rolled up our sleeves. And built the world's best country to live in. And we shall do that again."
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So what about the "new direction" that got me thinking about hats old and new in the first place?
Andersson claimed that under her leadership the Social Democrats had become a "more streamlined and effective" party.
The congress not only marked the conclusion of the party's bottom-up policy rethink, but it also saw a change of guard. Morgan Johansson, Anders Ygeman, Peter Hultqvist and Ardalan Shekarabi, four leading figures from the previous Social Democrat government, look sidelined. Teresa Carvalho, who is fronting the party's tough-on-crime approach, was voted onto the powerful controlling committee, and Lawen Redar, who has been fronting a new plan to combat segregation, was also prominent. Mikael Damberg, however, remains solidly in place.
At the end of the Old Hat New Hat, the bear tires of the hats on offer, rejecting each in turn as "too fancy, too shiny, too frilly, too bumpy" and so on, until he catches sight of his beloved patched-up original hat, and tries it on approvingly in the mirror, with the words "just right, just right, just right".
This isn't quite what the Social Democrats have done. It is still the same cautious party, but it has some new policies, and in Andersson's speech and the congress as a whole, at least some new momentum.
So neither old hat nor completely new, but somewhere in between.
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What else has been happening this week in Swedish politics?
Moderate Party calls for Magdalena Andersson to resign
As the Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson played at being prime minister, the ruling Moderate Party was arguably acting more like the opposition, calling for Andersson to resign after her party was fined 3 million kronor for its lottery miss-selling scandal.
Karin Enström, the Moderate Party's group secretary (and the sister of former national security advisor Henrik Landerholm), said that both Andersson and the Social Democrats' party secretary Tobias Baudin should resign.
"It's so serious. It has never happened in Swedish politics before that a party has been fined 3 million kronor. You can't just shrug off the blame," she told Swedish Radio in an interview.
Andersson hit back, joking that "this may not have been the best of weeks for the Moderates."
Moderates lose voters to Centre Party
The Moderate Party has lost voters to the Centre Party since the party appointed Anna-Karin Hatt as its new leader, according to a new poll from Indikator for Swedish public broadcaster SR.
According to the poll, the Moderates have lost 3.7 percentage points, taking them to 17.4 percent, at the same times as the Centre Party has gained 1.7 percentage point, taking the party to 5.8 percent.
The other big winner was the Sweden Democrats, which gained 1.8 percentage points, giving it a strong lead over the Moderates on 20 percent.
The Social Democrats gained 0.6 percent, taking them to 36 percent.
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Inquiry calls for state apology to international adoptees
A government-appointed inquiry has proposed halting all international adoptions and called for a state apology to those adopted under questionable circumstances.
The investigation, led by civil law professor Anna Singer, found evidence of child trafficking in about ten cases, mostly from the 1970s and 80s. In many more cases, parental consent was missing or poorly documented.
Singer said Sweden can no longer ensure ethical standards abroad and criticised past inaction by Swedish authorities. 'The state must acknowledge the human rights violations that occurred and apologise,' she said.
The inquiry was launched in 2021 after reports surfaced of children stolen from countries such as Chile, China, and South Korea. Social Services Minister Camilla Waltersson Grönvall said the government would review the report and did not rule out an official apology.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson's three daughters are all adopted and he served as chair of Adoptionscentrum, the organisation arranging international adoptions to Sweden, between 2003 and 2005.