Jacob Christensen

As 2005 nears its end (what? already? Wasn’t New Year last week?) it is time to take a look at one of the strangest series of accidents in international politics. To make a long story short: We have a winner – or loser – in the competition for the 2005 Spontaneous Political Combustion Awards.But just as a reminder – let’s begin with a list of the also-rans and the runners up:The Also-RansSome politicians made valiant efforts during 2005 but failed in delivering the truly surprising goof. Worth mentioning are:

• Louise Frevert. Was always a loose cannon first in the Conservative Party and now in the Danish People’s Party and her handling of the anti-Islamic rants posted on her homepage really wasn’t a surprise. But it was highly entertaining.
• Henriette Kjær. Former Conservative Minister of Consumer Protection who will be happy to tell you why you should always check your bank account before you buy new furniture. And no: It’s not paranoia if they are out to get you.
• Eva Kjer-Hansen. Liberal Minister of Social Affairs who happened to voice Liberal opinions on two occasions. The Liberal Prime Minister thought that was a really bad idea and forced her to swallow her own words in a really, really humiliating way.
• Laila Freivalds. Swedish Foreign Minister who performed a memorable goof back in 2000 when she bought her own appartment. The deal was perfectly legal but politically inconvenient and after an acrimonious brawl with a bunch of journalists outside her home, Prime Minister Göran Persson sacked her. She returned as Foreign Minister after the murder of Anna Lindh in 2003, only to become the punchbag of Swedish media.
• Tom DeLay. Controversial Republican Congressman who provided us with the mugshot of the year. Need I say more?

The Runners-Up

• Frank Jensen. The man who tried to be elected chairman of the Danish Social Democrats by threatening to leave politics if he lost the vote. He lost the vote.
• The entire Swedish left. Seems to have vanished without a trace. Please contact the nearest newsdesk if you have any information about its whereabouts.
• The German Social Democrats. This party changes its leadership as often as other people change their underwear. Maybe an East German chairman will do the trick.
• The German Christian Democrats. An East German chairman did the trick. Almost. Party grandees will do their best to undermine the leadership.
• Tony Blair. British Prime Minister. Was the darling of the chattering classes during the 1990s. Is the darling of George W. Bush today. Lost the general election in spectacular fashion but retained government power thanks to the quirks of the first-past-the-post system. And no: I don’t think that Gordon Brown will succeed Blair as British PM.

But The Winner (Loser) Is:Jacques Chirac probably can’t wait to see the end of 2005 which can only be described a miserable year for the French president in political and personal terms.Chirac is one of the veterans of the French 5th Republic and his political career began in the 1960s when he was a protegé of the later president Géorges Pompidou. He quickly earned himself the nickname “le Bulldozer” for his no-nonsense approach to political negotiations and he also held a number of high offices since the 1970s.His two terms as French PM between 1974 and 1976 and again between 1986 and 1988 as well as his long term as Mayor of Paris from 1976 to 1995 are especially noteworthy: As PM, he twice found himself engaged in an uneasy cohabitation as the junior partner of the imcumbent president, while a series of economic scandals from his time in Paris continue to haunt him.Still, Chirac’s terms as French president have been less than happy. He finally succeeded in winning the presidency in 1995 after defeating first his own creation Édouard Balladur who had turned against him and then the lugubrious Socialist Lionel Jospin, only to see Jospin reappear as winner of the 1997 general elections.The 2002 presidential elections showed that Chirac’s grip on the French electorate was still insecure. Paradoxically, it was a group of French left-wingers and disgruntled Socialist voters who secured Chirac’s reelection by leaving Lionel Jospin in third spot after Chirac and Jean-Marie le Pen of the Front National. We shall never know what might had happened in a run-off election between Chirac and Jospin – in the end le Pen lost to Chirac by 18% to 82% but that result says more about the limits of the far right’s appeal than about support for Chirac.2005: l’Année le Plus HorribleThe point of this History of Jacques Chirac is that Chirac’s presidency rests on an insecure basis. Chirac is intelligent enough to know this and it may explain some of his actions during 2005.Chirac’s first big problem was what to do with the proposal for a European Constitution. Theoretically he could have presented the treaty for ratification in the French parliament and that would have ended the matter – at least until European leaders had to decide what to do about the Dutch.On the other hand, the British PM Tony Blair in early 2004 had announced a British referendum on the treaty – a step that would remove the issue from the campaign for the general elections but also a step that was likely to lead to a defeat of the proposed treaty. Calling a French referendum could be seen as a way for Chirac to enhance his negotiating position vis-a-vis the British government after the expected defeat in the British referendum just as Chirac’s predecessor François Mitterand had done in 1992 after the defeat of the Maastricht treaty in the Danish referendum.Provided Chirac was able to mobilise his own majority, that is. And despite some help from the French Socialist Party in the campaign, Chirac not only suffered a defeat in the French referendum: Chirac never really managed to organise a convincing campaign, his own interventions proved disastrous and in the end the treaty was defeated by a clear majority of 55% to 45%.That left the 72-year old Chirac reeling but he had two more disasters waiting for him. In September he was hit by what in official language was called “a small vascular incident affecting his eyesight”. Less diplomatic sources used the term “minor stroke” and French voters were reminded about former presidents Pompidou (who died of cancer while in office) and Mitterand (who was visibly ill with cancer and had difficulties performing his duties during the later years of his presidency and died only few months after leaving office). Yet another infirm president is not what France needs most in its present state.Just as a reminder of the insecure position of the French government riots broke out in a number of suburbs in Paris in late October and the French government scrambled to find an adequate response to the problems much to the delight of conservative commentators in the U.S.That the French electorate isn’t happy, either, was proved by an opinion poll where only 1% (one per cent) wanted Chirac to run for a third term as president in 2007.The problem is that French politics are more or less stalled for the next year-and-a-half with an ageing, unpopular president in office and deep divisions within both the left and the right side of politics while internal and external problems accumulate.So maybe Chirac’s implosion is in fact a symbol of a French malaise rather than a case of Spontaneous Political Combustion?

If you should believe the Swedish opinion polls, the aftershocks following the release of the Disaster Commission’s final report had an unexpected victim: The centre-right opposition.

The private RUAB and one week later the Statistical Office published results which showed that the four centre-right parties were loosing support while support for the Social Democrats was increasing.

This was surprising, given that the commission criticised Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds and Prime Minister Göran Persson for their (lack of) preparation of crisis management procedures and (lack of) initiative in the hours and days following the tsunami disaster.

One right-wing commentator took the interesting cue that the numbers actually showed that support for the centre-right had increased and that the apparent flow of voters to the Social Democrats was the result of statistical manipulations by the Statistical Office.

The commentator could of cause be accused of presenting an ad hoc argument: If support for the centre-right increases, the numbers reflect a shift in the public opinion. If support for the Social Democrats increases, the numbers reflect incompetence at the Statistical Office. This led to an amusing war of words in the Swedish press.

The centre-right will probably not complain about the lastest opinion poll performed by SIFO and published by Svenska Dagbladet. Here, the Social Democrats loose support while the Conservative Party can record significant gains.

So, is the Swedish public opinion really that unstable or are the Swedish pollsters incompetent?

First, it is worth noticing that Swedish pollsters have experienced some nasty surprises at the latest elections. In 2002, nearly every pollster missed the surge in support for the Liberal Party. In 2003, they predicted a victory for the “no”-camp in the EMU-referendum but still missed the actual result by a wide margin.

And finally, the 14% support for the Euro-sceptic Junilistan at the 2004 European Parliament elections went unnoticed by opinion polls. New parties may be excused if they don’t take opinion polls too seriously.

I would argue that the pollsters have a problem, but that the problem is of a kind that makes it worth studying in greater detail.

As everybody – except journalists, that is – know, opinion polls are not mirrors of public opinion: They are, more or less, informed guesses about public opinion. Pollsters – and academics who do or use survey-based research – know that the “raw” numbers are less than precise and need to be adjusted.

“Adjusting” survey results is an art-form – there is nothing unethical about the procedure, but the numbers in themselves do not give an indication about what kind of adjustments it may be relevant to perform.

To me, it seems obvious that Swedish pollsters during the last years have had problems in finding a credible way of adjusting poll results. My best guess is that “something” – and no: I can’t tell exactly what that “something” is – has happened in Swedish society during the last decade and that pollsters still have to catch up with societal changes. British pollsters will be, if not exactly happy, then able to tell a tale about the 1992 general election which ended in a spectacular failure for the opinion polls.

Comparing polls from the 2006 election campaign and the results of the 2006 election will be an interesting exercise even if it may not hit the front pages of the national newspapers.

And with this post, I wish possible readers a Merry Christmas/Holiday/Whatever. I will return with a post on the winner (or loser, if you like) of the 2005 Spontaneous Political Combustion Award in two weeks’ time.

One of the more gruesome questions one might consider is whether it it possible to commit suicide by decapitating yourself.

The answer – amazingly – is yes but the procedure is not one I would recommend: The preparations are cumbersome and if you succeed, the results will be pretty messy. If you don’t succeed – well, we really don’t want to think about the consequences. (My advice: Buy a single ticket to Iraq. The locals will be happy to assist you.)

Chop – Chop – Chop!
Still, in politics other rules apply and during 2005 the German Social Democratic Party managed the impressive feat of decapitating itself, not once but three times.

The first chop took place in March when a still anonymous member of the state parliament in Schleswig-Holstein abstained from voting for the reelection of Heide Simonis as Prime Minister. Following an election which left the Landtag with no clear majority, Simonis had assembled an uneasy and controversial coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Südschleswiger Wählerverband which would give her the number of votes neccessary to get elected as state P.M.

But it was not to be: Someone – and to this day, we don’t know who the defector was – withheld his or her vote four times in a row and in the end Simonis gave up. After drawn-out negotiations the SPD did enter the state government but as the junior partner to Peter Harry Carstensen’s CDU and Heide Simonis’ political career was a thing of the past.

The second chop took place in late May when the SPD after nearly 40 years in office in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen lost to the CDU led by another less-than-inspiring candidate. The loss was the latest in a line of electoral fiascos for the SPD at the state level but no-one had expected the reaction of the national SPD leadership.

Instead of living through another 18 months of political agony that would surely end in a victory for the CDU, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and SPD chairman Franz Müntefering decided to call for a national election in September. Strangely, Schröder and Müntefering seem to have taken the decision without consulting any of the competent organs of the SPD or the leadership of their coalition partner, the Green Party.

As the German constitution discourages early elections, the road to the election was messy and included a faked vote of no-confidence in the Bundestag. The results were equally messy as neither the SPD nor the CDU/CSU were able to form a majority government. This led to another two months of political instability. And the third chop.

The election night on September 18 was the end of Gerhard Schöder’s political career but Franz Müntefering wowed to stay on as party chairman and Deputy Chancellor in a coalition between SPD, CDU and CSU. Commentators among other things discussed the lack of rejuvenation in a SPD led by 65-year old Müntefehring and in the end rejuvenation came. But in a way no-one had expected.

Müntefehring wanted a right-hand man to take care of day-to-day business and communications while he was occupied with government business and suggested that his protegé Kajo Wasserhövel should be appointed as the party’s Secretary General. (The title overstates the S.G.’s political importance – the post really is more clerical than political).

Someone among the party’s left-wingers thought that this could be a low-cost opportunity to establish their faction’s claim to political influence without messing up the coalition negotiations too much and proposed the promiment young left-winger Andrea Nahles as an opposition candidate.

Nahles not only won the vote in the executive committee of the SPD – she won by a clear majority, and the party and the rest of Germany could only watch in amazement as Franz Müntefering immediately declared that he would be resigning as party chairman.

After a few days of negotiations, the SPD managed to find a new party chairman: Matthias Platzeck of Brandenburg who in many ways is the anti-thesis of Müntefehring. Platzeck is not only East German, he also started his political career in the civil rights movement Bündnis ’90.

Anything You Can Mess Up, We Can Mess Up Better!
If the internal struggles of the SPD were fascinating, the chaos within the CDU and CSU as state grandees did their best to demolish the national leadership was truly amazing to watch.

Back in 2002 Bavarian P.M. Edmund Stoiber still managed to win the spot as the two Christian Union parties’ candidate for the chancellorship. Stoiber lost, retreated to Munich and behaved as if he had won the election.

A lot of CDU grandees – including Peter Müller of Saarland, Christian Wulff of Niedersachsen and last, but definitely not least Roland Koch of Hessen – had to put a brave face on Gerhard Schröder’s surprise call for early elections as this left the East German, Protestant woman Angela Merkel as the party’s leader.

Still, the knives were sharpened. Stoiber refused to commit himself to a future Christian Union-led government in Berlin. So did Friedrich Merz whom Merkel had squeezed out of the office as parliamentary leader of the CDU. And the triumverate Müller, Wulff and Koch weren’t exactly supportive.

This left Merkel without a prospective Finance Minister for her shadow cabinet and in order to cater for the Germans’ almost fetishistic need for Sachverstand, she added tax expert Paul Kirchhof to her competence team.

Kirchhof was best known for advocating the abolition of all of the exemptions and benefits that make the German tax codes impossible to understand, in favour of a flat rate-tax. Even though Kirchhof had no actual chance of making it to the Ministry of Finance, the flat rate-tax became the main subject of much of the electoral campaign and probably cost the CDU some votes.

Edmund Stoiber’s main contribution to the campaign came in the form of an insult to the East Germans by calling them a bunch a frustrated people who shouldn’t have the right to determine the direction of German politics. The result was a lot of angry East Germans and apathetic Bavarians.

After the election Stoiber managed to undermine his own credibility by first agreeing to join the CDU-CSU-SPD coalition as Finance Minister and then jumping off the ship when Franz Müntefehring was defeated by his own executive committee.

Stoiber’s reception back home in Munich was not just cool, it was icy. (That’s icy as in “the surface temperature on Neptune”).

The probability that Messrs Müller, Wulff and Koch will contribute to the general entertainment for the years to come is pretty high. In a recent interview Christian Wulff promised that the state Prime Ministers would do anything to take the lead in policy debates as Chancellor Merkel would be bogged down in mediation attempts in Berlin.

The statement was immediately interpreted as a threat that Müller, Wulff and Koch would be happy to undermine the authority of their own party chairman and leave the party in chaos.

After all, you don’t really expect that a woman can lead a party and a government in the 21st Century, do you?

Angela Merkel could answer by referring to that famous quote: “They misunderestimate me” and leave the three gentlemen with egg on their faces.

Politics, journalists tell us, is all about getting into office. Not so, political scientists reply, getting something done when you’re in office is just as important. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that political journalists and political scientists in general feel that the opposite site has a completely distorted view of politics.

But what about the cases where politicians perform truly unbelievable acts that can only be described as the political equvalent to spontaneous combustion?

Is there some logic behind this kind of behaviour or are we beyond the realm of rationality?

That strange things actually do happen is certain as this review of 2005 will show.

Vote for me – or else…!
Danish politics has always been the home of many an oddball over the years but in terms of Spontaneous Political Combustion 2005 was a quiet year.

Former Consumer Affairs Minister Henriette Kjær will testfy that furniture can be a political liability. I still don’t understand why nobody told her to get an accountant, but there you go. In terms of politcal damage, her resignation was barely noticed by the Conservative Party and the publication of her autobiography coincided with the release of a handfull of books about the internal struggles in the Social Democratic Party.

Louise Frevert might seem a likely candidate for the title of Spontaneous Combustion of the Year 2005 were it not for her reputation as a loose cannon. Still, she managed to sabotage any hopes the Liberal Party under Søren Pind might have had of winning the office of First Mayor in Copenhagen and embarass her own party on the national level. Slightly. After all, her only mistake seems to be that she published what everybody in the Danish People’s Party thought.

In my opinion the strangest thing which occured in Danish politics during the past year was something completely different and it had to do with the election of a new chairman of the Social Democratic Party.

It is an old truth that if you are facing an uphill battle in politics, your only credible threat is to declare that you will be staying in your present position even if you loose.

So: Why, oh why, did Frank Jensen announce that he would be leaving politics if he lost the chairmanship vote?

Despite his 44 years, Jensen is a veteran politican. He has been in the Folketing for 18 years and a minister for nearly 7 years. He really should have known better. But he didn’t and lost the vote to Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

That last time anybody heard of him, Jensen appeared as a contestant in an entertainment programme on Danish TV.

He lost again. This time to the political spokesman of the Liberal Party. (I actually watched the final programme of the series. Believe me: That was a creepy experience!)

On the other hand, Jensen’s apparent political deathwish could be interpreted as an expression of rationality.

After all: Who, in his or her right mind, would want to be the chairman of the Social Democratic Party in its present state?

The Last Communist Party
Sweden has a long tradition of left-wing politics and in political terms, the country also seems to move in the opposite direction of most other European Countries.

In other words, the time should be ripe for the Grand Entry into national politics of a New Progressive Alliance.

The only problem is that the Swedish left is imploding politically.

It’s not just the Left Party, which is falling apart in all directions: Gudrun Schyman’s Feminist Initiative went into rapid decline as soon as it was formed and the internal opposition within the Left Party couldn’t decide on whether it would form a breakaway party or not

The disintegration of the Left Party is not that difficult to explain. After all the party has only really been held together by a series of larger-than-life chairmen – and in the case of Gudrun Schyman: Chairwoman – while the party has been split between communists, new leftits, feminists and what have you.

Electing a communist – yes: Lars Ohly was a communist until he declared that he would not longer call himself a communist – as chairman was a really bad idea.

The thing is: Communists believe in Ideology, Organisation and Strong Leadership. Leftits believe in ideologies, endless discussions and not being bossed around by The Man.

And by the way, these days there are only three communist regimes left on this planet: North Corea, Cuba and Belarus. Not exactly leads that many Swedes would like to follow.

The road should have been set for Gudrun Schyman’s Feminist Initiative to mobilise lots of disillusioned voters but for some reason the initiative has failed completely so far.

During the spring Schyman – who is otherwise a shrewd media politician – found herself in the shadow of academic Feminist Tiina Rosenberg who managed to get into pretty vicious conflicts with basically everyone in the initiative’s leading group.

Rosenberg succeed in getting the initiative to adopt a resolution which called for the abolition of the existing marriage laws in favour of a Partnership Act which would treat nearly every thinkable human liaison equal in legal terms.

The Swedes weren’t appalled by the idea. They just didn’t care too much about the issue, the Feminist Initiative disappeared from the political radar and Tiina Rosenberg retreated back into Academia. Schyman has yet to recover from the incident.

Note: There is noting strange about the way Tiina Rosenberg’s first name is written. Rosenberg was born in Finland and “Tiina” is simply the Finnish way of writing “Tina”. Rosenberg may be queer but she is not a numerologist.

Last Wednesday, the Danish Welfare Commission published its final report.

Some, like the Conservative and Social Liberal Parties, looked forward to the event, while the Liberal Party probably had more mixed opinions. After all, one of the purposes of establishing the commission was to remove a troublesome issue from the political agenda.

Just to recapitulate: In late 1998 the Social Democratic-led government introduced a reform to the highly popular Early Retirement Benefit, which since 1979 has given wage-earners the opportunity to leave the labour market at 60, provided they are members of an unemployment fund.

Economists loved the reform and praised it as an example of good policy; Blue collar voters hated it and left the Social Democrats in droves. Unfortunately for the Social Democrats, there are more blue-collar workers than economists in the electorate.

Since then the received wisdom in Danish politics has been that tampering with the Retirement Benefit is a little like trying to dismantle an atomic bomb with a hammer: You do it at your own risk and the effects in case of an emergency will be deadly.

This has left Danish politics in an odd situation. On the one hand, the centre-right government wants to promote labour market participation and reduce benefit dependency.

On the other hand, the government has done what was possible to keep the question of reforming or abolishing the Early Retirement Benefit off the agenda. After all, it was the anger of blue-collar workers at the 1998 reform which triggered the great realignment in the Danish electorate and brought the present government into power.

Establishing the Welfare Commission back in 2003 was one way of keeping this potentially damaging issue under wraps. If asked, the Prime Minister could simply reply that the government was waiting for the Commission’s report to be finished.

Now, the wait is over, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen probably feels like one of the German guests in that famous “Fawlty Towers” episode.

Not only do the economists insist on the need for abolishing the Early Retirement Benefit – the equivalent of offering “Prawn Goebbels” on the menu – they also call for tax cuts on work income and increases in property taxes.

To a government whose main initiative in tax policy has been to freeze the entire tax system and leave it as it was in 2001 whatever its economic consequences, that is like performing the Prussian Stechschritt complete with fake mustache in the corridors of power.

And if the guests complain about the bizarre behaviour, they will be met with the answer: “Well, YOU started it, didn’t you?”

While the Social Liberal Party and the Conservative Party welcomed the proposals, the Liberals tried to stall the issue.

The result has been heated exchanges in the media between the Prime Minister and the commission (see for instance this article in the daily Politiken) and the commission even published an article stressing the need for tax reforms.

Just to add to the Liberals’ misery, the Government’s own advisors in the Economic Council also warned about the need for tax reforms that would shift the burden off work and to property.

In a really strange development, the P.M. and leader of the Liberal Party had to distance himself from an e-mail message sent by the party’s political spokesman Jens Rohde to local branches where Mr. Rohde warned party activists about making demands for reforms in social and tax policy.

No policies, please, we’re a government.

It is probably a good thing that the Liberals have the teachers and immigrants to hurl abuse at.

Back in the early 1980s a Danish goalkeeper from a Division I side earned his 15 minutes of fame.

His feat? After clearing a shot, he was to throw the ball back into play. That is usually a fairly undramatic procedure, but the goalkeeper for whatever reason forgot to let go of the ball, turned around his own axis and hurled the ball into his own goal. The stunned referee was left with no other choice than to allow the goal and as the game was being recorded for television, the rest – as they say – was history.

Casual observers of Swedish politics with some knowledge of soccer history should be excused if they were under the impression that the four centre-right opposition parties have taken their cue in the handling of the Tsunami Crisis Management Report from the unlucky goalkeeper.

Instead of mounting some kind of coordinated attack on the government, the four parties have managed to look hesitant, insecure and uncoordinated.

The first question facing the parties was whether or not to call for a vote of not confidence against the government or one or more of the ministers criticised in the Tsunami Report. Given the media attacks against Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds, she would have been an easy target.

But no. After some considerations, the four parties chickened out and declared that a vote of no confidence would be a waste of time, as the Left and Green Parties would be supporting the government.

This is undeniably true but misses the point that a vote of no confidence could be used to group the Left and Green parties with the Social Democratics which means that the two small party would share the political blame for the government’s handling of the crisis. Voters who were angry at the government would then have to think twice before voting for the Left or Greens.

Equally, the lack of momentum in the political response of the opposition did not look promising, but at least the parties agreed on using questioning in the Consitutional Committee of the Swedish Riksdag as their political vehicle.

Allmost agreed, that is: The Centre Party decided to break ranks and call for a vote of no confidence against the Foreign Minister.

One problem with this strategy is that the Centre Party only holds 22 seats in the Swedish parliament and 35 are needed to call for a vote of no confidence.

Another problem is that the move did not go down well with the other parties and the Stockholm-based centre-right newspapers who were quick to describe the Centre Party as unstable, incompetent and ideologically suspect.

Spin doctor, anyone?

If the brouhaha surrounding the distribution of political offices in Copenhagen City Council was your cup of coffee, then I would suggest Egedal as a delightful avec.

Egedal is a merger of the existing Stenløse, Ølstykke and Ledøje-Smørum communes to the west of Copenhagen. All are relatively cozy, suburban – or perhaps rather: sub-sub-urban – and very middle-class communities that have been governed by Liberal or Conservative mayors.

As a consequence, the political and administrative fusion of the units was not an easy process.

At the local elections, the Liberal Party won 10 out of 27 seats in the new local council, the Conservatives 8, the Social Democrats 5, the Socialist People’s Party 2 and the Social Liberal Party and Danish People’s Party 1 each. The outgoing mayors – Willy Eliasen (Lib, Stenløse), Sven Kjærgaard (Lib, Ølstykke) and Jens Jørgen Nygaard (Cons, Ledøje-Smørum) – attracted most personal votes (See this pdf-document for precise information) and as it turned out, internal conflicts within the factions of the Liberal party triggered a dramatic end to the process of electing a new mayor and distributing committee chairmanships.

According to reports, the mayor of Stenløse, Willy Eliasen, originally managed to reach an agreement with the Social Democrats that would make him the chairman of the transitional authority and eventual mayor of the new Egedal Commune. Not all Liberal councillors were happy with the distribution of portfolios in the new local council, however.

At the first meeting of the new local council Eliasen faced an open rebellion from four Liberals and one Social Democrat, and in the end Sven Kjærgaard of Ølstykke was elected mayor with the support of the Conservatives and the single DPP councillor.

What is worth noticing is that the Liberal and Social Democratic defectors all came from the old communes of Ledøje-Smørum and Ølstykke. Obviously the local Liberal Party organisation had failed to manage conflicts between the old units. A local newspaper even reports that the Liberal Interior Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was called in in an attempt to mediate between the factions but failed.

Added on 2005-12-10: The Danish national newspaper Politiken has published an article with more of the sordid details. Enjoy.

Following the publication of the Disaster Commission’s report, there has been considerable uncertainty about the political consequences of the – judged by Swedish standards – extremely harsh criticism against government ministers and leading civil servants presented in the report.

The centre-right parties have appeared insecure in the question. Right now, the impression is that the four parties will refer the matter to the Constitutional Committee in the Swedish parliament rather than call for a vote of no confidence against PM Göran Persson or Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds. (See for instance this report in Dagens Nyheter)

In this way the parties may hope to keep the question on the political agenda up to the elections in September. The Social Democratic response has been to accuse the centre-right of exploiting the tsunami disaster for electoral purposes.

We also see attempts by Social Democratic media to downplay the importance of the criticism: One line of argument is, that since the Swedish government did not cause the tsunami, it would be unfair to criticise the handling of the disaster; another that crisis management is less relevant on the political agenda compared to labour market policy (This comment in the Social Democratic periodical Aktuellt i Politiken may serve as an example of the line of argument).

Interestingly, Göran Persson already last Thursday in an interview in the news programme Aktuellt tried to undermine any criticism from the Centre Party by arguing that the party had supported the government in its rejection of calls for the establishing of a crisis management group within the Prime Minister’s Office (Thursday’s programme can still be watched through this link).

From the point of view of a political scientist, the interesting question is why it is almost impossible to demand political accountability in Sweden. I would argue that there are two possible answers, which do not exclude each other.

Alternative 1: Social Democratic Hegemony
For 73 years, Sweden has been ruled by Social Democratic governments. The only exceptions were a short interlude during the summer of 1936, a succession of weak and highly unstable centre-right coalitions between 1976 and 1982 and finally Carl Bildt’s four-party coalition which soon after taking office in 1991 discovered that it had to rely on Social Democratic support if it wanted to lead any kind of economic policy.

In the end voters realised that the Social Democrats were the only credible government alternative.

This logic also applies to some crucial parliamentary crises. In 1990, the Left Part tried to threaten the government under Ingvar Carlsson to abandon parts of an economic crisis package only to find that it would either force an early election – and bring a centre-right government to power – or accept the government’s policies.

Following the 2002 election, the Green Party tried to enhance its negotiating position vis-à-vis the Social Democrats by leading talks with the centre parties. Again the threat turned out to be impossible to enforce politically and the Social Democrats were able to control the political agenda.

To sum up: In the present situation, the opposition could of cause call for a vote of non-confidence against either the government or individual ministers but the move would not only fail; the government would continue convinced that no outside forces would be able to threaten it.

In analytic terms there is no “exit” opportunity in the Swedish political system which means that distrust against a Social Democratic government can only be expressed through “voice” (i.e. criticism) within the party or a decline of “loyalty” among voters (note the decline in turn-out at the last elections) and party activists (note that the P.M. increasingly picks his ministers outside of traditional party ranks).

As the internal criticism against Göran Persson and – to a lesser degree – Laila Freivalds is muted and as the party leadership clearly tries to dismiss any external criticism as unjustified politicking, the probability of any resignations is low.

Alternative 2: The Political and Administrative Tradition
One strange aspect of Swedish politics and administration, which immigrant social scientists find it hard to adjust to, is that the country has been put together by not one, but an endless number of committees.

Committee or collegial rule was a well-known element in early modern European public administration. Two advantages of collegial rule were that, first, it allowed for cooptation of elites into the royal administration, while at the same time limiting opponents’ chances of building alternative power bases.

In most other countries, collegial rule fell out of favour during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Colleges were seen as inefficient compared to bureaucracies because they carried with them the possibilities of dispersing responsibility for decisions. Another reason why governments increasingly chose the bureaucratic model for public administration was the widespread corruption connected with collegial and other traditional forms of administration (See for instance this article in Wikipedia as an introduction to the subject).

Political and administrative modernisation in Sweden both pre- and post-dated the bureaucratic era of the mid-19th century.

The foundations of the Swedish public administration were laid during the Freedom Era in the 18th century – the tradition of semi-independent executive agencies as the backbone of the public administration dates back to the mid-18th century – but Sweden never really embraced bureaucracy and the concept of individual responsibility and accountability in the way other Western countries did.

Unlike their Danish or Norwegian counterparts, Swedish government ministers are strictly speaking not the political heads of their respective departments but rather rapporteurs who act as links between the departmental colleges and the government college.

In this way the political reluctance to demand individual accountability reflects an established administrative tradition.

And So What?
Defenders of the Swedish model may argue that the Danish and Norwegian Foreign Offices performed just as poorly as their Swedish counterpart during the tsunami crisis. In other words, individual responsibility and accountability in themselves do not make a government more efficient than a collegial type of government.

On the other hand the long-term fall-out of the tsunami crisis was much more limited in Denmark and Norway. The Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, quickly recognised the scope of the disaster and in an unusual move devoted all of his traditional New Year’s Speach to the subject of disaster relief.

This is of cause a counterfactual argument but I would suspect that the Danish government would have faced strong criticism that could have been potentially damaging in the upcoming election, if Fogh Rasmussen had not made a forceful statement on the subject that day.

The point here is that a) the Danish political system is much more competitive than the Swedish, which makes politicians more responsive to public concerns, and b) individual ministers, including the P.M., are expected to react immediately and visibly to criticism because of the individual nature of responsibility and accountability.

Copenhagen is the largest town in Denmark. Its city council also easily qualifies as the weirdest among the 98 councils left by the local government reform.

In the Beginning…
Just to recapitulate: At the elections on November 15, the Social Democrats won a convincing victory under ex-minister, ex-European Commissioner and ex-party whip Ritt Bjerregaard. Bjerregaard had been chosen especially for the task of keeping the office of First Mayor on Social Democratic hands in a situation where a succession of apparatchiks had led the party into electoral decline and the local party was unable to recruit a leading candidate.

Not all local Social Democrats were happy with the choice: Bjerregaard was an outsider to Copenhagen politics and several would-be mayors saw her as a threat to their own political careers. Environment Mayor Winnie Berndtson – who had held hopes of leading the Social Democrats – effectively got the boot this summer.

We Have a Deal – or Maybe Two
Bjerregaard’s victory was not enough to secure the office but the Social Democrats and the Social Liberal Party in coalition would command the slimmest of majorities. This was the result of negotiations on election night.

At this point things started to get messy: Leading Social Democrats reconsidered their position and decided that it would be a good idea to bring some extra parties on board, just in case that someone should get the bad idea of defecting in the last moment. Enter the Socialist People’s Party and the Unity List and then the centre-left command five out of seven mayoral portfolios, while the Liberals – whose local leader Søren Pind quit on election night – the Danish Peoples’ Party – led by the unlucky Louise Frevert – and the Conservatives would share two portfolios among them.

Then came the defection. However, it was not a Social Democrat or a Social Liberal who changed horses in mid-stream. Wallait Khan left the Liberal Party to become an independent. Khan promised to support the centre-left coalition and that would give the coalition not five, but six out of the seven portfolios. Khan in return would get the office as second deputy chairman of the City Council which is not an executive office but still relatively well paid.

The Liberals were less than happy with the new situation, but it turned out that the Socialists positively loathed the idea of welcoming Khan – he had left the Socialist People’s Party for the Liberal Party back in 2000 – and his inclusion in the majority coalition also caused an angry reaction from a Social Democrat councillor, Sikandar Malik Siddique, who like Khan is of Pakistani descent. (Or rather: An angry reaction from Siddique Sr., the father of the Social Democrat councillor).

Things Get Really Messy
Khan was an obvious target for political attacks. His motive for leaving the Liberal camp was not particularly convincing and the conservative weekly Weekend-Avisen started publishing articles depicting Khan as a person with a somewhat dubious background.

Khan’s and Siddique’s Pakistani background also became the focus of media reports. Danes are generally uneasy about immigrants and the suspicion was raised that Khan literally had been speaking with two tongues – supporting the Liberal stance on immigration and integration while at the same time supporting Islamist organisations Hisb-ut-Tahrir and Minhaj-ul-Quran (for coverage by Danmarks Radio see this link) – and acting as an Islamist fifth column agent within the Danish political system. The Social Liberal Party was by now deeply suspicious of Khan.

Khan got more bad publicity when it emerged that he had tried – in vain – to get elected to a local political office in Pakistan. In the end Khan had to withdraw his candidacy as the second deputy chairman of the council – that office would now go to a Social Democrat – but he stayed in the coalition.

Things Get Really, Really Messy
But it was not over yet. On December 2, veteran Social Democratic councillor Finn Rudaizky left his party to become an independent member of the council. Rudaizky criticised his former party for accepting Sikandar Siddique’s alleged contacts with Hisb-ut-Tahrir, but also said that he would not tilt the balance between the blocs in the City Council.

Ritt Bjerregaard answered by saying that Rudaizky had only earned his council mandate through the party’s list vote and urged him to resign from the City Council.

…but We Hadn’t Seen the Worst Yet
On Sunday, acting Environment Mayor Winnie Berndtson announced that she would not only be leaving the Social Democratic group but also support the three right-wing parties in the election of mayors. That move will probably mean that a Liberal councillor rather than Social Democrat Thor Grønlykke will become Social Affairs Mayor.

Since being dumped by her (see above), Berndtson has been an intimate enemy of Bjerregaard and has voiced harsh criticism of Bjerregaard’s personnel policy on several occasions, but Berndtson’s defection is nevertheless an amazing climax to an already surprising political battle.

What Was That All About Then?
First of all: It’s not all over yet. This tale may still hold one or the other twist that will turn it into complete farce or madness, depending on your point of view, and any conclusions are bound to be partial or premature or both.

What is certain is that it is very hard to see anything even remotely related to policy in all of these manœuverings. Perhaps the Socialists and Social Liberals came closest when they demanded a statement from Khan where he renounced any Islamist movements working among the immigrant communities. Khan obliged but also realised that he was not acceptable as a candidate for any council office.

In the Khan/Siddique-affair, Danish media have concentrated on clan politics within the Pakistani community. Clan based politics obviously clashes with the Scandinavian style of politics which since the early 20th century has been firmly based on ideological and social conflicts. Ethnically based politics may be legitimate to Danes and other Scandinavians but clan based politics definitively is something deeply alien – and Siddique Sr.’s actions on behalf of his son is probably the closest you get to a kiss-of-death in Danish politics even though Danes have a fair number of political families.

Another aspect which further erodes Khan’s and Siddique’s political legitimacy is the allegations about covert support of Islamist movements. There are two aspects to consider here:

• First, in the present political climate, movements like Hisb-ut-Tahrir and Minhaj-ul-Quran are off bounds for any aspiring politician in any party. Period.
• Second, candidates who appeal (exclusively) to an ethnic electorate will always be under suspicion for literally speaking with two tongues. Khan’s “support” for Hisb-ut-Tahrir could strictly speaking be interpreted as a support for the freedom of speech and association, but as he is a Pakistani and getting his votes from the Pakistani community, he is automatically suspected of fifth column-activity. Rudaizky’s defection could be seen as proof that Danes have a deep distrust of immigrant communities.

Finally, there is the Berndtson defection. My best guess is that we are down to a question of office here, to use political science lingo. Berndtson had held hopes of succeeding Jens Kramer-Mikkelsen as First Mayor but was rejected for a number of reasons – the dirty one being a scandal about her appointment of a former partner to an administrative post. When Ritt Bjerregaard declared that she would not nominate Berndtson as Mayor, Berndtson was a spent force with no future in the Social Democratic organisation. As she doesn’t have anything to lose, she can now retaliate by hitting Bjerregaard and her allies in the party where it really hurts.

Note: Weekendavisen’s and partially Berlingske Tidende’s websites are paysites so direct links to the papers’ articles would be less useful but both newspapers have reported in depth on the story during the last two weeks. The homepage of the local Danmarks Radio station has a convenient overview of articles relating to the developments following the election.

To call a book about the CDU Power and Loss of Power may seem a bit odd, given that the party not only has won most of the recent state elections in Germany in the last year but also regained that most cherished of political prizes in Germany: The office of the Federal Chancellor.

The title was probably more appropriate when the book was originally published in 2002 at a time when the party still hadn’t recovered fully from the Kohl-era and its political future was much more uncertain. Anyway, any criticism should be pointed at this reader rather than at the author – I bought the book back in 2002 but didn’t find the time to read it until this summer – and in any case Power and Loss of Power is an excellent book that just like good wine has aged very well.

As a political phenomenon, the CDU is hard to understand for Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons. The CDU is not a conservative party but has its roots in the Catholic Zentrum which played an important political role in Imperial Germany and during the Weimar republic. Zentrum was a Catholic party and limited to getting a Catholic following but under its first leader Konrad Adenauer, the CDU managed to integrate the conservative Evangelical camp into its organisational and electoral base and create a nearly unified centre-right party.

When political scientists occasionally talk about catch all-parties – i.e. parties whose electoral appeal is general rather than limited to a certain camp – the point of reference is the development of the CDU’s and the SPD’s electoral strategies in the post-WWII era when both parties tried and managed to break out of their electoral “ghettos” and reach out to new groups in the electorate. Compared to the SPD, the CDU is a much more heterogenous organisation which may – paradoxically – explain why the latter party has succeded in dominating first West German and then German politics since 1949.

The high degree of heterogenity means that it is an extremely difficult task to describe and analyse the development of the CDU from the immediate post-war period when Konrad Adenauer against all odds managed to become the leading force in the creation of a political hegemony over a messy transitional period during the late 1960s and the long Kohl-era up to the scandals that shook the party between 1998 and 2000 and which – again against all odds – led to the election of an Evangelical woman from Northern Eastern Germany as the party’s leader.

To make a long story short: Bösch succeds in doing just that. On the one hand the book is a broad introduction to the programmatical development of the CDU and to the changes in the way the party is organised and financed and in the composition of its electorate. Bösch also addresses the question about the party’s ability to mobilise women electorally while failing almost completely to promote women within its organisation.

On the other hand the book is also based on very thorough studies of primary sources and a large number of interviews with CDU politicians and it contains descriptions and analyses that have been worked out thoroughly. If you are looking for anecdotes about German politicians, this is not the book to read, but if you are looking for empirically based descriptions and analyses the book has plenty to deliver. Best of all, the book is very well written and easy to read – provided of cause that you read German.

If I should point to some omissions then it must be that the interplay between the federal and state level is less well developed. Bösch notes how Adenauer in the period imediately after 1945 sabotaged attempts to create a strong, centralised party organisation while at the same time slyly outmanouvering local party leaders with aspirations about national power. Equally conflicts between party leaders on the state level and Bonn – and today: Berlin – have characterised the CDU throughout the life of the Federal Republic. However, a thorough presentation of these relations would had added at least another 300 pages to the book so in the end Bösch’ delimitation of his study can be defended.

Frank Bösch (2002): Macht und Machtverlust: Die Geschichte der CDU. Stuttgart: DVA. Avaliable at Amazon.de.