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Swedish Elections


John Simkin

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There have been two very interesting phenomena in all of this: firstly, how quickly the 'veil' fell, revealing a load of unreconstructed rightists; and secondly, how quickly the right-wing government imploded. Reinfeldt's election campaign was all about being 'new' … but it looks very much like the very, very old. The right-wingers in Sweden are a very strange breed. Unlike their counterparts in nearly every other European country, they've hardly ever had the chance to rule the country in modern times. It makes them very susceptible to fad policies, like a flat tax, and it's also meant that they never cleared out the aristocratic right. Bildt came out with a wonderful statement about how 'ordinary people' often had problems paying tax for their nannies, for example!

The budget, however, was the usual right-wing fare: you get the poor to work harder by paying them less, and the rich to work harder by paying them more. We're in for a hard four years …

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