Clowns

The Swedish social democrat party has ruled the country for 70 out of the last 85 years. They are, literally, the 6-ton elephant in Swedish politics, and they simply won’t move. In a triple meaning, that is:
● They won’t let go of the dominance they have over political discourse (as Swedes, we rarely actually face it and admit that Swedish public discourse is essentially shaped in the language of social democracy ...the trouble is, the party itself doesn’t abide by its own official, rather fancy welfare-state ambitions anymore).
● Secondly, they won’t move in any significant ways towards a more updated, globally concious, more liberal party programme... while they still – under the table – are imposing the same neoliberal market standards as all the other EU member states.
● And thirdly, they simply won’t ever admit to any mistakes, they won’t resign regardless what, and no criticism will ever stick. With a cunning shrewdness that even Tony Blair would be proud of, they dodge all criticism – it simply runs off them like water on a wet goose.

During the last weeks, a few things have emerged with regards to the top ministers in the social democrat government.
The most damning criticism ever launched against a sitting government was issued by the independent “Catastrophe Commission”, looking into the way the Foreign Office and the Government dealt with the tsunami disaster of last Christmas. The Foreign Affairs Minister, Laila Freivalds (above middle), was so heavily criticised that a majority of the Swedish people allegedly wanted her to resign, according to one of the daily newspapers.
But of course she hasn’t resigned — as would have been the standard response, for example in British politics. No, almost obnoxiously, she’s clinging on.
“While other much less badly affected countries were sending aid to the crisis area,” James Savage writes, “the government was still carrying on with Christmas holidays as usual” – and Freivalds even went to the theatre. In an inimitably naive, seemingly unwarily open-hearted manner, typical for Swedes (guess why they call it blue-eyed naivety), members of the government admitted to not following the news like the rest of the population, but rather relying on memos written by their civil servants (as if these would have had time perfecting memos while death and destruction raged all around them). Lower-rank executives in the Foreign Office immediately understood the serious nature of the situation and acted accordingly, while Freivalds afterwards has admitted to “not even knowing what Phuket is”. This sitting social democrat government, you see, is not only one of the poorest educated ones in the world – it seems like it is, perversely, also ignorantly proud of being so. (The former Minister of Finance, now vice-Prime Minister, Bosse Ringholm hasn’t even finished the Swedish equivalent of A-levels!)
The Swedish Ministry of Defence has during years decades of social democrat rule been stripped of any 24-hour duty service. There has deliberately not been any central operative crisis management system on the governmental level, because that would have been “undemocratic” according to the social democrat doctrine. In other words, any country could have invaded us at any point outside of “office hours”, and no Swedish ministers would have known until the Monday after (even more clever would have been to invade us during the summer months, since Swedish bureaucrats take out months worth of holiday absence).
Steadfast men and women of principle, those social democrats, one might think. Well, so much for principles, when it turns out that Prime Minister Göran Persson (above left) anticipated the damning critique of the Catastrophe Commission through announcing — two days before the publication of the report — that the government is installing this very thing: a governmental emergency service! Clever, isn’t it?

Moreover, and all the more seriously, the current Swedish government has been under severe criticism from human rights groups all over the world, because of the loathsome expulsion of two Egyptian asylum-seekers accused of being terrorists. The two men were expelled from Sweden to Egypt in 2001, on an airplane leased by the U.S. government. They were mistreated and possibly tortured by agents of each country, with the Swedish intelligence (SÄPO) not objecting at all — on the contrary, SÄPO helped seizing the suspects before “they were taken by masked American agents, who tied their hands and feet, stripped them naked and drugged them”. James Savage reports:

Swedish ministers frequently speak out against abuses in other countries; Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds delivered a speech in December last year entitled ‘Security and the Rule of Law’.
Julia Hall [counsel and senior researcher at Human Rights Watch] called Freivalds’ attempts to speak with authority on human rights "deeply hypocritical" when the government has not dealt with alleged violations on its own soil.

One of the men was later exonerated as a terrorism suspect by Egyptian police, while the other remains in prison there, probably being subjected to torture. (Further links; 1, 2, 3, 4.)
There is still uncertainty as to whether CIA airplanes have landed on Swedish soil post-September 11, and according to State Secretary Dan Eliasson “nothing — absolutely nothing — indicate that any airplane hired by the CIA would have executed prisoner transports to or from Sweden. The authorities in question have gone through archives of recent landings in Sweden to verify this”. The problem is, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, that these archives are hardly comprehensive: The aviation Traffic Control data get erased after 30 days unless they are listed as somehow special.

This leads us over to the final issue of severe criticism launched against the Swedish government: the controversial data retention directive proposed by the EU Commission and Ministerial Council, which has unfortunately recently met support also in the EU Parliament.
The directive, thrust through by the UK under their Presidency and after the events of July 7th, is avidly supported by Swedish Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström (above right), and is claimed to be counteractive against terrorism. I myself severely doubt this. More plausibly, it risks to significantly fracture the personal privacy of EU citizens.
Whatever the tally of the Parliamentary vote, Bodström asserts that the directive would have become reality anyway, at any cost. He doesn’t give two flying figs about parliamentary participation:
“If the Parliament votes for it, that gives it a democratic surplus value — if they are against it I anticipate a ministerial decision,” he said to Swedish newpaper Dagens Nyheter. Democratic surplus value? Is this what a parliamentary vote merely extends to in Bodström’s world? I know the EU Parliamentary powers in reality are crippled (they only stretch to halting or delaying directives), but can a Minister be more blatantly arrogant in his attitude?

The Swedish social democrat party claim to embrace values such as transparency, accountability and responsibility, when it comes to issues of leadership and hierarchy — but in reality, as I have been trying to convey, we are dealing with a transatlantic cruiser organisation model; slow-responding, numb to the point of stupidity, Machiavellian in its dealings, often flat-out draconian in its actions.
Not surprisingly, the legacy of Göran Persson is now under investigation. He has repeatedly been criticised for an autocratic leadership style, both from within his own party and from independent commentators. An academic enquiry is now underway, investigating the “presidentialization of parliamentarism”.
Traditional social democrat Lena Hjelm-Wallén, who left the government in 2002, is worried that the current development is at crash course with the Swedish tradition of collective decision-making in the goverment. “I would not like a president-like system where it is the Prime Minister, not the collective, which in effect makes the government,” she says to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

As with New Labour, then, Swedish social democratic hegemony is all smiling faces and rather vacuous rhetoric.
And what annoys me most, is that the ministers lean back so comfortably in the belief that (ostensibly) no other alternative exists to the centre-left coalition that their own party inhabits; this is precisely the same phenomenon as in British politics, where New Labour can abuse their position just exactly that much, because they know no-one would rather see a Tory government. So they are left to do pretty much what they please, under the guise of lovey-dovey one-size-fits-all socialism light, where the middle-of-the-road is sprinkled with just enough self-righteous spin to appear best in tournament.
Note | September 2006 will see the next general election in Sweden.