He’s not a minister, he doesn’t attend cabinet meetings, but if one figure has defined Sweden’s government of the past four years it hasn’t been Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, but the specter of Jimmie Åkesson.
Like the spectre at the feast, he’s both absent and present at the same time. He’s not actually sitting at the cabinet table (not having a ministerial post himself), but Kristersson can’t miss his presence. He’s reputed to spend as little time in Stockholm as possible, but he doesn’t need to be present to haunt the imaginations of politicians and voters.
But soon, in the (apparently unlikely) event the current ruling coalition gets re-elected, the ghost will be made flesh: Jimmie Åkesson and his Sweden Democrat colleagues will enter government and get up to half the seats round the cabinet table. Ulf Kristersson agreed that Åkesson can get half the seats around the cabinet table if he can remain at its head.
This might sound like a cosmetic change — after all, Åkesson has had huge influence over policy in the past four years — but it seems to have spooked voters: the left-wing parties’ lead over the government jumped in May.
The problem for Kristersson is that while the Sweden Democrats are the second most popular party, they are also the party voters are most likely to actively dislike. In a poll last year by Indikator, 48 percent of voters said they “greatly disliked” the Sweden Democrats.
Even among Moderate voters, 25 percent say they intensely dislike the Sweden Democrats. In a poll last year, 26 percent of governing party voters said they were negatively disposed towards the idea of Sweden Democrat ministers. This is bad news for the Moderates: fresh research this month from Indikator shows that four out of ten voters are as likely to base their vote on which party they dislike as on the one they like. This tendency was particularly strong among centrist voters.
The obvious risk for Kristersson is that inviting the Sweden Democrats into government could push potential Moderate voters over to the other side.
One strategy the Moderates are employing to deal with this is to persuade us that the Sweden Democrats aren’t as spooky as they think. One leading Moderate told me this week that Åkesson’s party was basically “centre right” these days.
Kristersson’s other tactic is to point to the spectres at the Social Democrats’ table: the fact is that the Left Party and Green Party are intensely disliked by a large portion of voters in general (26 percent), and right-wing and centrist voters in particular. This contrasts with the Social Democrats, Centre Party, Liberals and Moderates — less than ten percent of voters dislike these parties.
Among men, intense dislike of the Greens (39 percent) and Left Party (36 percent) was as common as intense dislike of the Sweden Democrats (38 percent). So for many voters, this is a plague or cholera election: whichever bloc wins, a party they dislike intensely will gain influence.
This explains Kristersson’s rhetoric in his Almedalen speech: while he mentioned the Social Democrats five times, he mentioned the much smaller Left Party and Greens seven and eight times respectively. A left wing government will be “radical left” and “a left wing experiment”. Green Party co-leader Daniel Helldén was mentioned as many times (twice) as Magdalena Andersson.
He’s been helped by revelations of anti-semites and conspiracy theorists among the candidates for Nooshi Dadgostar’s Left Party — undermining the more moderate image that Dadgostar has been projecting about here party. Conjuring up a left-wing ghost might not make voters love his government more, but it might balance out their distaste for Åkesson.
Magdalena Andersson is fighting back by trying to keep her ghosts from becoming flesh: while Nooshi Dadgostar insists that she’ll only support a government if she has ministers within it, Andersson is refusing to commit. Expect Kristersson to keep on conjuring that spectre.