SWEDEN - September 14, 2014 - GUIDE and THREAD

[Tayya]

So in the midst of this fire, the first poll in ages also came out today.

NOVUS:

M - 22,4% (+1,2%) 81 seats
FP - 6,1% (-0,7%) 21 seats
C - 5,8% (+0,2%) 22 seats
KD - 4,2% (-0,2%) 15 seats

S - 31,7% (-0,4%) 115 seats
V - 7,3% (+0,6%) 27 seats
MP - 9,9% (-1,4%) 36 seats

SD - 8,8% (+0,5%) 32 seats
FI - 2,6% (-0,3%) 0 seats
Oth: 1,1%

Alliance - 38,5% (+0,5%) 139 seats
Mushrooms - 48,9% (-1,2%) 178 seats

The Mushrooms would have a majority of four seats. 

...look a few posts up

Haha, I'm an idiot. Totally missed that Tayya had already posted the poll.
Damn it! Why must he be so quick.

I blame Twitter.

[Tayya]

Swedish Cheese sums it up brilliantly. The numbers should of course be seen in relation to earlier ones - the Left Party is still ~1.5% above its 2010 result.

If the Novus numbers hold up in other polls (the polling frequency usually skyrockets in the second half of August) we are seeing a slight shift towards the status quo/normalcy. If that is what's happening, Novus's long and early (for August) collecting period could indicate that the actual shift is even larger which would definitely endanger the chance of a stable government after the elections.

[Tayya]

New SIFO poll out. You won't get any results from my phone but M is up while MP is down signalling that the post-EP bump is over as the opposite was true in May. Red-Greens don't budge thanks to S improving, Alliance improves despite C and FP losing thanks to a strong showing for M (23,9% - the mighty has fallen...) The margin is SVaMP up 9.8% with a bare majority in mandates. SD holds still at 9, FI down to 2.6% (will they fade before the election??), others down big from an improbable 1.9% to 0.8% contributing to most if the margin decrease.

[Tayya]

What Fred describes deserves an explanation for the international audience but it won't be good enough from my phone when I'm on holidays abroad.

Summarized: Gov't proposes tax decrease for well-off people, red-greens and SD opposed but somehow three red-green MPs miss the vote (Including S group leader Mikael Damberg (!) and V leader Jonas Sjöstedt (WTF.) so the tax break accidentally passes and the red-greens have to exploit the budget process to stop it, opening a can of worms. Compare killing the filibuster.

[Tayya]

Rerevising my prediction to a gov't hold. Margins decreasing, brainwashed faninists not coming around and it's becomkng more and more clear that the right plans to utilize SD to stay in power essentially forever to feed their donors with the ruins of our welfare state.

[Tayya]

For the record, the article is from 2006 and while they've not retracted that policy they're campaigning on platitudes rather than real issues. The article has been spread on social media lately for political reasons.

[Tayya]

Summarizing the last few days of meta-chaos:

The Swedish Migration Board, noting what a cluster the world is in currently, has requested more money to handle an uptick in asylum seekers. The amount of money requested is about 7 billion USD - that is to say, a lot of money. PM Reinfeldt noted that asylum seekers would require a larger part of the budget and probably replace any allocations to reforms, but called on the populations to open their hearts and minds and welcome those in need.

We're kind of far from Denmark. For better and worse, I guess.

Anyways, this has been lauded by liberals, seen skeptically by leftists (who think that it's a plot to strengthen SD and deny a red-green majority, making a Reinfeldt government supported by SD possible) and the SD crowd is likely nuts - their supporters tend to sound like the most radical fifth of the Tea Partiers.

Meanwhile, Reinfeldt and Löfven debated in the Sunday evening political show Agenda - which for the record should show that SD definitely isn't marginalized by the media - where Reinfeldt seemed to retract his promise that he and M would vote "present" on Stefan Löfven's confidence vote if the Alliance became smaller than S, V and MP.

Lööf (C) and Björklund (FP), meanwhile, declared that they'd stay with the promise, and Moderate Secretary General Kent Persson later declared that the promise held, but yesterday Göran Hägglund (KD) said in an interview that he'd have conditions for voting present and indicated that the same was true for the other parties. Indeed, all four parties presented today that they would only let a government through if it could present a budget in October.

In Sweden, passing a budget requires a plurality of the votes. The government is standing together and will all assured have a common budget proposal. What this means is that unless S and MP becomes larger than the Alliance without V - which they are currently in many if not most polls, but will probably not be once the Alliance-leaning undecideds return to the fold any day now - V will have to promise to vote for the S/MP budget or present it together with them, which is probably doable but tricky considering how much they want to be in government, or actually join the government. The latter won't happen because S and MP won't completely stop for-profit actors in the welfare sector. Oh, and SD will also have to not join the Alliance budget. If it's still too liberal on immigration, they likely won't, but SD will have the power to potentially keep Reinfeldt as Prime Minister. It remains to see whether that will be too tempting.

[Tayya]

Indeed. For us, these are very large numbers, that should be recognized. I'm surprisingly more skeptical of immigration than others who fall close to me in other questions, but the problem here isn't primarily that we accept too many but that so many European countries are, frankly, selfish and don't.

Time will tell if we're seen by history as naïve fools or as one of few beacons of morality in Europe.

Fun fact: Fokus - Sweden's best political magazine - has this as their front page tomorrow:



"What does Jimmie Åkesson cost? The risks with the Moderates' dangerous game"

[Tayya]

I think the budget/government thing is mostly to make people concerned about what government will happen after the election. It makes sense from the right's perspective.

The immigration thing is I think a fairly logical move as well. Reinfeldt doesn't want to play the racist card and then this is probably the best course of action.

And to force Löfven to form a three-party government with the Left, setting the Alliance up for a 2018 victory.

Of course, it would be so much easier to pile on Reinfeldt if there actually was a gentlemen's agreement. Löfven is unfortunately overconfident enough to not himself promise to let an Alliance that remains stronger than S, V and MP through.

A possible outcome is that Reinfeldt and Co. are betting on V and S/MP to not agree on a budget, which would lead to the Alliance budget having a plurality over the S/MP, SD and V budgets, and then passing SD-optimized budgets the coming years - which leaves them time to flip-flop and potentially change leaders - when V will have been pressured into a joint budget proposal with S and MP.

EDIT: This is a big simplification - the budget voting is conducted, as most other votes in the Riksdag, through eliminations of the least popular proposals meaning that the top two budgets (Alliance and the one supported by the Social Democrats) will be put against each other for a vote. V will have to vote "present" in this vote for the Alliance budget to go through unless SD votes for the Alliance budget.

Would every single right-wing MP accept voting for a de facto SD-supported government? An open question, but there will probably not be more than a handful of objectors which won't be enough.

[Tayya]

I don't think anyone genuinely doubts that S, V and MP could make a budget together. The question is what happens if they don't have a majority which is still a feasible scenario. A budget that V is on board with would probably be a hard sell to any of the other parties. This is why S keeps flirting with C/FP.

Indeed, but as long as S/V/MP is bigger than the Alliance they can govern as a minority as long as SD doesn't join an Alliance budget. Finding cross-aisle support for individual policies is also hard but perhaps more doable.

[Tayya]

Stefan Löfven's path to Rosenbad has become ever so slightly easier: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/22/us-sweden-election-idUSKBN0GM1CQ20140822

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[Tayya]

I wonder if this could hurt V's electoral results (and thus indirectly the Red Coalition) though.

Nah. I can't think of a V voter that doesn't presume that they'd support a Löfven government.

[Tayya]

Soon 3 weeks and 1 day until Election Day and we have a new SIFO poll:



S, V and MP barely, barely have a majority together.

The M and C results for this week are relatively big changes, but both make more sense this week than last week. SD doesn't appear to have gained from Reinfeldt's speech (but their numbers are painfully big.)

For the record, this is almost exactly where I predict the actual opinion to be at currently.

[Tayya]

I wonder who the 2-2,5% who still supports FI are. In addition to being basically superfluous, they're also obviously a spoiler for the Red-Greens. 8 years of a centre-right government really should make a few of them vote tactically - then again, it would not be untypical if the left ruined its own chances.

Bobo people who can't read poll trends and who think that most feminist = most right.

An important factor to take note of is that 4% isn't the only threshold in Sweden. 1% of the vote gets a party state-funded ballots for the two following elections and 2.5% means that a party gets funds from the state. I don't know the exact amounts but Fi would be able to multiply their campaign budget several times with state money. Therefore, a Fi vote is somewhat less useless than it appears.

[Tayya]

Expressen/Demoskop also has a poll out today showing mostly similar numbers to SIFO, though weaker for the Red-Greens, slightly stronger for M and over 12% for SD. I'm not getting the exact number because Expressen is a blue-leaning tabloid and their last poll was before the summer when the EP election was still fresh, meaning that the Moderates climbing 4% is presented as a huge success when they're going from under 20 to 23.5. Frankly, I don't need that headache.

Suffice to say, a SVaMP majority is looking somewhat more unlikely.

[Tayya]

OK, guys, stop this. Danish and Swedish media both love to score cheap points through demonizing the other country, which affects our relations negatively. No need to keep that demonization rolling. There are things both countries can learn from each other.

[Tayya]

If anything, I'm a Finn.

[Tayya]

Today is a great day, because as of today, early voting has started.

Also, we're having a Novus/Göteborgs-Posten poll of the Gothenburg local election:



Changes since the 2010 election:

S: -5.2% (29.4%)
V: +2.7% (7.1%)
MP: +3.6% (9.9%)

Incumbents: +1.1% (46.4%)

M: -1.8% (25.5%)
FP: -1.6% (8.4%)
C: +0.8% (2.3%)
KD: +1.3% (3.8%)

Right-Wing Bloc: -1.4% (40.0%)

SD: +1.9% (4.5%)
VV*: -2.1% (5.3%)
Fi: +0.3% (1.2%)
Others: +0.1% (2.7%)

This is despite the incumbent government performing badly and being hit by corruption scandals as well the local tabloid forcing through a referendum on congestion taxes against the political majority's will. I'm especially surprised by the slumping of VägValet (the single-issue anti-congestion tax party) considering the latter, but perhaps voters still haven't remembered their existence. It might just be a sloppy poll, though. The sample size is only 500 and 20% are still undecided.

[Tayya]

New Sifo poll:

S: 29,0% (-1,9%) 106 seats
V: 6,1% (-1,4%) 22 seats
MP: 11,0% (+0,7%) 40 seats

M: 22,6% (+0,4%) 82 seats
C: 5,9% (+0,4%) 22 seats
FP: 5,8% (-0,2%) 21 seats
KD: 4,5% (+0,2%) 16 seats

SD: 11,0% (+0,9%) 40 seats
FI: 2,9% (+0,6%) 0 seats

* * * * * * * * *

Alliance - 141 seats
Mushrooms - 163 seats

The left is 7 seats short of an overall majority. HUNG PARLIAMENT!!!

Who'd have ever guessed that Gudrun Schyman would end up as the savior of the right. How long until left-wing people start calling for FI-supporters to abondon the party for tacticaal reasons again... counting down three.. two.. 
 

Considering the rabidness of their core supporters, some (me) might just not bother calling them out, in order to avoid being scathed. Initiate Operation: Subtlety.

[Tayya]

The hate against FI in this thread is just incredible. If there's one thing Europe clearly lacks - or the world for that matter - it's having more parties like FI.

Now onto something completely different. I've calculated the average of the 11 polls done so far in August, as published by Wikipedia. Those include 4 from Sifo, 3 from United Minds, 2 from Ipsos and one each from Demoskop & YouGov.

The August average of Swedish polls show this ranking:

1. Sosialdemokraterna - 30.4%
2. Moderaterna - 22.3%
3. Sverigedemokraterna – 10.4%
4. Miljøpartiet – 10.3%
5. Vänsterpartiet – 6.9%
6. Folkpartiet – 6.5%
7. Centerpartiet – 4.9%
8. Kristdemokraterna – 4.3%
9. Feministisk Initiativ – 2.9%

Which gives us these constellations.

S + MP + V = 47.6%
S + MP + V + FI = 50.5%
M + F + C + K = 38%

In other words, the red-green side is currently leading by between 9.6% and 12.5%. It'll be interesting to see which party will end up as the third most popular party in the end.

Btw, FI is basically the anti-SD party, even though Reinfeldt would very much like to have Moderaterna as the anti-SD party.

For what it's worth, I wouldn't really mind them at all if they weren't probably spoiling a red-green majority.
Including the polls from early August isn't a very good practice, for what it's worth. The race has probably tightened since then.

I like to use Botten Ada, a Bayesian predictor. They rely too much on the Statistics Sweden biannual poll, though, which tends to overstate S, so subtract 1% from S and add to M and you get a realistic result.

[Tayya]

Can't we just skip that whole election thing? Just rehash an old one (how about 2002?) instead.

[Tayya]

Actively considering moving to Canada.

[Tayya]

The fun thing with analyzing politics from a structural, fly-on-the-wall perspective is that you see things coming. It still kind of hurts when the actual numbers arrive, though.

[Tayya]

I don't have a personal investment in disliking Stephen Harper, so that's probably a net positive.

On happier notes, here's a movie for ya.

[Tayya]

So Aftonbladet has gotten hold of the information that the Minister of Financial Market, Peter Norman (M) sent a text message containing the words "You owe me big time" to a "star lobbyist" at the Federation of Swedish Farmers after the latest budget was presented in April, which included a hefty dose of pork for the rural areas. The lobbyist - who is female - is apparantly "friends" with Norman, but the article essentially confirms that they had an affair, especially by noting that the government staff responded to investigations with a press release on Mr. Norman and his wife getting divorced. He has apologized for sending the SMS, for the record.

You can't make stuff like this up, folks. It's Friday, though, so it won't be as big of a deal as it could have been.

http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/valaret2014/article19481211.ab