The outcome in Swedish politics in the next ten, fifteen years will be determined by what the Social Democrats choose to do from now on.
There is no indication that the Green Party or the Left Party are capable of changing the direction of Swedish politics; the parties are too small and will not attract broad masses of people. The two parties are an important part of a red-green bloc, absolutely, and it is crucial that these three parties find a basic affinity and are more often loyal to each other.
But the great party remains, for the foreseeable future, the Social Democrats. So everything actually depends on which way the party chooses to go.
Some time ago, party leader Magdalena Anderssons gave a speech that was announced as a line speech. It was released on Youtube and probably not many people saw it. The news media didn’t report much on it either.
The news media, with their constant commentators, are also unable to handle such a thing as a one-liner: They are looking for daily political developments; ideological and political changes they are barely able to decipher.
But it was a line speech Andersson kept. Although the line was sort of broken in the middle and ended at a chasm where she was left standing. Magdalena Andersson enumerated a series of so-called market failures – everything from the market school to a railway that no longer works.
She is no agitator and she spoke almost more like a concerned national economist than like a committed politician. But the line speech marked a fundamental reorientation: She saw the entire neoliberal era, from the eighties onwards, as a failure, symbolically crowned by the fact that today gang criminals can run medical centers on their own.
I have not heard a social democratic party chairman speak so clearly and so comprehensively in a very long time. She left for a while the myopia of daily politics.
The cliff she stopped at was the basic foundation of economic policy since the nineties: the fiscal policy framework. Abolishing it, so that politics can once again invest long-term in welfare and infrastructure, is the very prerequisite for social democracy to be able to take the lead and power.
The austerity policy, the loan ban, is today also criticized by bourgeois parties and by Swedish Business – and it is hard to understand that S does not dare to take this step and extend it to other than nuclear power and defence.
When I listened to the Riksdag debate on the right-wing government’s spring budget, I understood that so far there is no will on the part of Mikael Damberg and the rest of the S leadership to say what is necessary:
Abandon the austerity mindset so that this country can invest itself out of the ongoing crises.
Neither does the S management even dare to touch in the case of an increasingly decisive conflict of goals: How much more resources should a growing military defense be deprived of investments in healthcare, education and care? I am convinced that this conflict of goals must ultimately be dealt with.
What the Social Democratic Party decides to stand for in the next six months determines the future of a generation ahead. For a number of years, with the first steps during the pandemic crisis measures and then due to the war against Ukraine, as well as the constant criticism of a de-privatized Swedish school, there has been a wave of increased trust in the state through practically all politics.
During crises, the whole society cries outafter more social planning and then the state, with its budget and democratic means of power, is what everyone ultimately looks towards. The right only looks to the state for increased rearmament, more repression and tax cuts. But now we are in a situation where the Social Democrats should clearly come out and say it:
The market and privatizations do not solve the problems we have.
From now on, Social Democracy must take the lead in awakening the reform optimism that presupposes massive public measures, whether it concerns increased equality or a green transition.
Social democracy is sluggish, it is ideologically depleted, it lacks agitators and as a people’s movement it has weakened enormously. But it is he who determines how the outcome in Swedish politics will be.
