Why a new Centre leader might mean the end for free school reform
Given the prospective new Centre Party leader Anna-Karin Hatt's background as leader of a free school company, she seems unlikely to let her party join a future push to stop private companies profiting from education, argues The Local's Nordic editor Richard Orange.
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The nomination of the veteran Centre Party politician, Anna-Karin Hatt, as the sole officially sanctioned candidate to lead the party last week was one of those moments when foreign journalists like me struggle to understand how the Swedish media works.
Hatt used to be the CEO for a company running free schools, Didaktus, which was reported to the Schools Inspectorate shortly after she stepped down, and also faced criticism for grade inflation, before being bought by Academedia, Sweden's biggest free school company.
She was CEO of Almega, the service sector trade body to which The Local also belongs but which also contains Almega Utbildning, the trade body representing free school companies.
During her tenure, some of the trade body's member companies threatened to leave it in protest at efforts to build contacts with politicians from the far-right Sweden Democrats (which, perhaps not coincidentally, began to change its position on free schools at around that time).
Given that the most significant change to Centre Party policy under the outgoing leader Muharrem Demirok was a tougher stance on free school reform, you would have thought all this was important information.
Free schools, and the broader issue of private companies profiting from providing welfare services is, after all, one of the central questions in Swedish politics.
Well over two thirds (68 percent) of Swedish voters support stopping companies from earning money from running state-funded free schools, and that even includes a slim majority (53 percent) of those who consider themselves "somewhat to the right" politically.
That no party on the right has ever come close to supporting such a ban is, researchers like Anna Tyllström at Uppsala University, argue, evidence of policy being skewed by lobbying by powerful economic interests, of parties not representing voters.
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But these aspects of Hatt's CV were almost entirely missing from the Swedish media's coverage of Hatt's nomination, including The Local's, with the two public service broadcasters SVT and SR, and left-wing and liberal newspapers like DN and Aftonbladet, and the TT newswire all omitting to mention her background as a free-school CEO and lobbyist. The only exceptions were the left-wing newspaper Dagens ETC and the anti-lobbying campaign site Klägget.
There is, of course, a lot more to Hatt than that. She was Sweden's IT minister for four years during the Alliance government, and her appointment will see the party once again led by a political heavyweight.
In an opinion piece in Aftonbladet on Easter Saturday, Daniel Suhonen, the head of the left-wing Social Democrat think tank Katalys, mentioned that Hatt had, "like all centre-right politicians, run a free school", downplaying the significance of her background.
He argued that, whatever her personal preferences may be, she will never be able get voters' backing to join the three government so-called Tidö parties and form a government with the support of the Sweden Democrats.
If she were to choose to back Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson in the 2026, he predicted, the Centre Party would never get the four percent of votes needed to enter parliament.
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I'm not sure he's right. Unlike Demirok, Hatt may be a skillful enough politician to bring her voters with her while remaining non-committal on whether her party will back a Moderate Party or Social Democrat prime minister.
She might argue - probably rightly - that this would give the party maximum influence in the post-election negotiations.
One thing that does look certain if she gets voted in as leader, though, is that the days when the Centre Party looked like it might push to limit, or even stop, free school companies from extracting profits, are over.
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What else has been going on in Swedish politics?
Social Democrats launch media blitz ahead of congress
The Social Democrats on April 16th published the five political 'riktlinjer', meaning "guidelines" or perhaps "lines of direction" for its party congress at the end of next month. The result of a long bottom-up process of policy renewal, the proposals, as expected, cement the party's shift to the right on immigration and law and order.
The party accompanied the release with a media blitz led by its two rising stars, justice spokesperson Teresa Carvalho and culture policy spokesperson Lawen Redar. The former gave a long Saturday interview with Swedish radio, in which she pledged that the party would "not lead a government that is soft on crime". The latter told the Expressen newspaper's politics podcast that Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson was "worried" about the political positions her party was developing on immigration.
Party leader Magdalena Andersson, meanwhile, let a reporter from Amelia, the biweekly women's lifestyle magazine, follow her around for a day before sitting down for a highly personal interview about her father's dementia.
Party secretary Tobias Baudin then followed up with a debate article in the Expressen newspaper on Monday in which he argued that the "poor leadership" of the current government was "badly damaging Sweden".
Left politician off hook for 'deeply antisemitic' cartoon
Swedish prosecutors have decided not to launch an investigation into the Left Party MP Lorena Delgado Varas after she was reported by the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities for hate speech. Delgado Varas had shared a cartoon on X in which Israel controls the USA like a puppet, with the USA then controlling the rest of the world. The text read: 'The Zionist Jews control the world'. The council called the cartoon "deeply antisemitic".
The government proposes criminalising virginity tests
Sweden's government has sent a proposal to the Council on Legislation to make it a crime to carry out virginity tests, issue virginity certificates, or fail to disclose child marriage or forced marriages as part of its efforts to combat honour crimes. The law is hoped to come into force on December 1st.
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