Swedish election 2010

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Governments often make a bit of a recovery in the runup to an election; we'll see how this one pans out. Btw, changed the thread title so we can use this for the whole of it all.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't think that this discussion is all that enlightening

[Filuwaúrdjan]

...as far as the election itself goes, it'd be useful if someone posted poll numbers here.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm talking about the city itself. Suburbs are not part of the city, ever. Period.

But where do the suburbs begin and the city end?

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Well, no, but the posh parts would be if they were in a country where class is one of the main factors in voting patterns, rather than a secondary one.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There are clearly defined borders.

Aha... legal boundaries...



Most people in (say) Morley or Yeadon would not take too kindly to being told that they live in Leeds. Both towns are, as you can see, inside the boundaries covered by Leeds City Council. Are people in those towns wrong to consider themselves as not living in Leeds? And if so, why? Are cities only legal entities, or do they have some other existence?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Most centres of industrialisation in Sweden were away from the capital. Which isn't that unusual.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think the other factor in Sweden is that the "bourgeois" parties tend to NOT to preach any of the rightwing populist socially conservative garbage you see in other countries. In the US, UK, France and many other countries people in the cities get turned off the small "c" conservative parties because they get bogged down in that.

That's not really true of Britain (except, perhaps, the 2001 election). The Tories do alright in London; they didn't poll all that much lower there than they did nationally and were genuinely shocked not to top the poll citywide. Most other large cities are industrial and not 'natural' Tory territory anyway; they've crashed in the posh parts of most of those, of course, but that's largely because they've been supplanted as the middle class anti-socialist party of record in them by the LibDems.

It's also worth recalling that when the Tories preached 'rightwing populist socially conservative garbage' the hardest (the 1987 General Election) they did better in London than they had in any General Election since the 1930s.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well, the mainstream conservative party there is made of fail.

Btw, links to detailed electoral data are always welcome

[Filuwaúrdjan]

or the UK where Labour did a lot better in London than across England

...yet worse than in almost any other large city. At least if we're defining London as the GLC/GLA area.

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A very high proportion of Labour voters in London live in social housing, so are actually outside the property market. I don't know how much social housing (or the Swedish equivalent) there is in Stockholm, but I'm guessing not a great deal. Another issue is minorities; how white is Stockholm?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Stockholm is non-white for Sweden, but I think something like 70% white maybe. At least I seem to recall such a figure from somewhere.

How many of those classed as 'non-white' can vote?

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But, presumably, no districts full of poor people?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But, no, not entire districts in the core of the city.

...which is the key point. London has always had large districts full, pretty much entirely, of poor people. It's actually one of the defining features of the city. It also has districts that combine large numbers of poor people (secure-ish in social housing) with large numbers of rich people in private housing of one kind or another; this is also one of the defining features of the city. If London did not have these things, then it would be a Tory bastion and then some. It also wouldn't be London.

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The key point is marginalisation and status as 'the other', rather than dubious 'racial' categories.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

BTW, I'd like to apologize for my overtly hackish and partisan comments earlier on in this thread.
I got carried away a bit I'm afraid.

Happens to us all, sometimes. Have a look at some of the threads from the recent election over here

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, the way that the Moderates have eaten into the support of the other bourgeois parties is one of the most interesting recent political developments in Sweden.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, summer polling is worthless in most 'western' countries.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

According to Sahlin there are two parties she would never work with under any circumstances, Sweden Democrats, and the Moderates. And even if she would change her mind, Reinfeldt wouldn't ever agree to becoming a junior minister in a Sahlin lead Goverment.

That often translates as 'make way for the compromise leader!', but who knows.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And it's a problem for the same reason the expense scandal was a problem in Britain.

Hysteria?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You'd be surprised at how little research there is into far-right voting patterns.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Evidently the Swedish media aren't quite as laughably hypocritical as ours.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I thought the Swedish SDP has finished first in every election since like ever.

They have but they used to do quite a bit better than c. 30% and conservative voters were usually dispersed across multiple parties.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

All LO-members I know

Not the best method of electoral analysis in the world

An uncle of mine (now dead) was a Labour voting farmer (who owned his own land as well).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An exceedingly stupid comment, even by the standards of that place. In a British context 'Swedish Social Democracy' usually means 'the fact that Sweden has a welfare system similar to Britain's but far more extensive', so, yeah. That's unlikely to change no matter the election result, and neither will the position of the Social Democrats as one of the strongest social democratic parties in Europe. Obviously it would be sad if the record of always being the largest party ends, but that record is deceptive anyway (due to the now historical fragmentation of the Right), and in any case it would only mean the end of a record, not the end of the party that made it. The SPÖ is doing alright (certainly in comparison to most sister parties), despite losing its pretty impressive record in 2002.

3. The era of Swedish Social Democracy as we used to know it is over.

Indeed it is. However, this has been the case for about two decades or so now (although you could go even further back, I suppose, but the early nineties is the usual time cited in academic works).

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Also true, but, again, this is not new. What is new is that the methods of dealing with this long-term crisis (which dates from different times in different countries, but is over two decades in all) have recently been exposed as flawed and perhaps even ultimately damaging (the latter point is especially true in the case of the SPD, of course).

For those that doubt that there's a general crisis, consider this. No matter how badly the Social Democrats do, the percentage of the vote they will win will be one of the highest polled recently by any social democratic party in Europe outside certain extremely polarised countries in the South with only a recent-ish history of democratic elections (and which can't be usefully compared in this way with the rest of Europe for those reasons). This was also the case with Labour in Britain earlier in the year.

But I stress again that the problem is the same as it was when it first manifested itself in the 70s and 80s (and a little later in Scandinavia, of course). And that problem is the old one, the same problem that caused so much concern to early generations of revisionist socialists, going all the way back to Bernstein. And his solutions were flawed as well.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I will be updating this after the Swedish elections, probably: http://besy28.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/comparingresults/

Countries that have had elections since I posted that:Czech Republic, Netherlands, Belgium.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

But I stress again that the problem is the same as it was when it first manifested itself in the 70s and 80s (and a little later in Scandinavia, of course). And that problem is the old one, the same problem that caused so much concern to early generations of revisionist socialists, going all the way back to Bernstein. And his solutions were flawed as well.

...which is what (the problem, that is)?

There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and no claim of one (not seriously, anyway. Certainly nothing that anyone would ever believe). Everything else flows from that. The specific difficulty at the moment is that it is hard to redistribute the proceeds of economic growth if there isn't any (or any worth more than the paper they're printed on). That, and the collapse of faith in economic planning and corporatism (which means that economic policies broadly similar to other parties tend to be followed in practice), and the increasing distancing of the leadership of such parties from the people that vote for them*. Demographic changes have been more of a problem in some countries than others; in the 1980s the only parties who's electoral decline was clearly linked to the decline of traditional forms of working class employment were the obvious ones; Labour and the SPÖ.

*This is quite recent, surprisingly enough. Hugh Gaitskell might have gone to Winchester, but he understood. Which is why there were pictures of him on the walls of miners lodges in County Durham before the apocalypse.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's true that it isn't really new (what ever is?). But still, it hasn't been realized and accepted in Sweden and especially not within the SAP until now.

I'm not denying the existence of political change in Sweden or anywhere else. Just taking issue with an exceptionally stupid comment (presuming that it was written from a British point of view; although I suspect that there will be many more stupid comment pieces in British newspapers following its general tone if the election goes a certain way) and using it as a springboard for wider rambling. I tend to find long term change more interesting than milestones, particularly as the latter tend to lend themselves to foolish long term predictions based on either wishful thinking or depression.

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No, I think I understand. When Labour failed to top the poll in the last European Elections in Wales, there was a lot of fuss made along those general lines. And that was just in a low turnout election that no one actually cares much about; had a similar thing happened in the General Election (Labour ended up 'winning' Wales by 10pts, so, yeah) I can only imagine the handwringing within the Party and the gloating outside it. But it's symbolic. A symptom and a milestone, but not a cause or a portent.

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Of course it is. And if the SAP fail to top the poll, then there will be profound changes in the internal culture of the SAP. No doubting that. But it won't be the end of anything. To bring up another example; the Socialists were 'defeated' for the first time in God knows how long in Wallonia in 2007. And topped the poll by miles this year. Milestones are not insignificant, but neither are they predictive.

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Yes, but the manner in which those governments were elected (and the way in which they governed) was symptomatic of the crisis. I suspect that this was less obvious in Sweden than most places.

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I don't see any reason to assume that. But that's a different issue, I think.

Of course, revisionist socialism is doing a lot better than certain other 'traditional' ideologies. Christian Democracy is almost dead as anything more than a brand name for unambiguously Conservative organisations.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm talking less about ideology per se (such as reformist socialism) and more about instutional structure.

But in this case the ideology and the institutions are linked at a fairly fundamental level. A crisis in one has always led to a crisis in the other. Some of the solutions seem to me to be quite obvious, but institutional inertia is what it is, I suppose.