Sweden had an election and as expected it was a bit of a mess.
At a fairly late stage the result looked like this:
That’s 143 mandates each to the left and right blocs and 63 to the racist dickheads. An image of perfect harmony (a fucking disaster).
Election night ended with 144-143 in favour of the left, but after more votes counted and a correction from one district today it looks like 144-142 will be the final result.
Just to explain what the traditional blocs look like:
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Left (Rödgröna): The Left Party(V), Green Party (MP), Social Democrats (S)
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Right (Alliansen): The Centre Party ( C), Liberals (L), Moderates (M), Christian Democrats (KD)
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Racist dickheads: The Sweden Democrats (SD)
So, the left still has the biggest share of the vote, but neither side has anything close to a majority. This hasn’t stopped the right coalition from demanding that the prime minister immediately resign, despite the fact that they don’t have a majority to form a government themselves. They could form a government by striking a deal with the racist dickheads (SD), something the racist dickheads have said they want to do, but all four Alliance parties have said they don’t want to do that, and two of them (the Centre Party and Liberals) have completely ruled it out.
So the left can’t form a government, nor can the right. This was the result last time as well, though it was a bit less even. The left has been in power (S and MP in minority government with support from V), which has worked because of a budget deal where the Alliance parties agreed to drop their votes on the budget. That deal has been highly contentious though (and was eventually broken), and it’s unlikely that we’ll see something similar for the next 4 years.
Possible scenarios:
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Right wing takes power with support from SD. I won’t rule it out yet, but for the Centre and Liberal parties it would be an absolute disaster. Even for the Moderates (think slightly more liberal Tories), when they publicly flirted with the idea of taking support from SD to bring down the government around a year ago they absolutely plummeted in the polls, had to change leader and still haven’t recovered.
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The right wing Alliance takes power with some deal of support from S. This seems to be what the right is angling for, as it would let them take power without the support of SD. S is still the largest party by a big margin though, and they would have to offer them one hell of a sweet deal, with S having the option to nuke them at will at any point during the next 4 years.
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A centrist coalition forms between S, L, C and MP. This seems to be what S wants and while it still wouldn’t have a majority, V has signaled that they would support them, meaning they could form a fairly stable government. This is probably what I’d prefer happen, but it’s a long way getting there given how rabidly C and L have distanced themselves from the left in the last couple of election cycles.
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A satanic union of M, KD and SD takes shape and plunges us into an age of racist, capitalist, conservative darkness. Thankfully this constellation would not have a majority and all the other parties have pledged not to give SD support. I won’t rule it out, because M and KD are fucking morons and I don’t trust the Liberals not to sign their own death warrant by supporting them just to keep the Social Democrats out of power, but it looks hightly unlikely.
The only silver lining of this election was that while SD grew a bit over 4%, that’s nowhere near what they were confidently projecting. Some polls earlier this year had them well above 20% (a couple even at 25%+) and being the 2nd largest party.
Turnout was also decent, at 84,4%, which is slightly higher than last election.
