Jacob Christensen

I forgot to mention that this evening, Göran Persson will descend from the Prime Ministerial Olympus to face his challenger Fredrik Reinfeldt in a debate on Swedish TV4.

Over on SvT’s Channel 1, Mona Sahlin Per Nuder Mona Sahlin will battle Maud Olofsson of the Centre Party. The thing about that debate is that it will be conducted in English.

Most of today’s debate has concentrated not on policies but on the fall-out of the Liberal Party’s intrusion into the Social Democratic intranet. Will the Liberal leader, Lars Leijonborg, be damaged goods at the end of the campaign? We shall see, but the fact remains that he either knew about the intrusion at an early stage (which is bad) or handled the situation in a bad way (which is of cause also bad).

A small observation from the Swedish election campaign: The Social Democrats have posted daily letters to the leader of the Conservative Party, Fredrik Reinfeldt, on their homepage for some time now.

What is interesting is that the sender isn’t Göran Persson, but Mona Sahlin.

Earlier in the campaign there was an incident when Mr. Reinfeldt refused to participate in a debate with the Social Democrats in Swedish TV because Sahlin and not Persson would be his opponent.

It’s not likely that Ms. Sahlin is being promoted as Mr. Persson’s eventual successor so my guess is that the Social Democrats either try to make Mr. Reinfeldt appear less important politically than the Social Democratic chairman or to protect Mr. Persson from direct comparisons with his opponent. Or they try to achieve both objectives at the same time.

The party secretary, Johan Jakobsson, has been forced to resign after it emerged that he knew about the intrusions on the Social Democrats’ intranet: Press release.

Meanwhile a Liberal member of the local council in Solna, a suburb of Stockholm, and a candidate in the upcoming local elections was litterally caught with his pants down: The politician was arrested for drunk and disorderly behaviour in a porn cinema in central Stockholm. As this is Sweden, he made a public excuse for visiting a porn cinema. (In some reports, the place is referred to as a strip club, not a cinema).