Jacob Christensen

While we are coping with one of the coldest winters for a long time (which may be a perverse effect of global warming – remember the difference between weather and climate), let me first take a look back to the summer with some photos from London.

First, the scorched lawns of Greenwich Park

Then the lush Chelsea Physic Garden (worth a visit, even if you are not into horticulture or plants as such)

A curious exhibition at Gabriel’s Wharf

And finally the National Gallery at night

The last week has brought a number of developments – besides the thwarted terrorist attack on Jyllands-Posten’s offices in Copenhagen we have had a number of political initiatives from the Liberal Party which is obviously preparing for the coming election. But I will wait for the prime minister’s New Year’s Speech before making any comments.

The only thing which is really certain about 2011 is that there will be a general election in Denmark and that the campaign looks set to be interesting for political junkies. See you!

One of my Christmas rituals is visiting my Dad’s grave at the cemetery. This year it was quite a task with all of the snow.

Remember 2008?

Back then we had something called Obamania, named after none other than the coolest guy on earth that year: Barack Obama.

Obama was so cool that rumour had it he could turn water into Bud Light (okay, so maybe that is not that much of a miracle) and single-handedly stop global warming. In fact, Obama was so cool in the eyes of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that they awarded him the 2009 Peace Prize for … euh … not being George W. Bush. Or something.

Myth aside, reality was more complex and just as fascinating.

Obama in many ways embodies some central elements of today’s global society and in becoming first US senator and then US president undoubtedly broke a lot of barriers. In a country where race does play a massive role, he was the first African-American president and despite all talk of the white working class turning against the Democrats because of Obama’s race, he did in fact manage to mobilise the traditional Democratic constituency of white collar workers and minorities. And quite a few other voters.

Obviously, by being African-American in the direct sense (Kenyan father, American mother) rather than the descendent of slaves, Obama was not troubled by the prejudices directed at “ordinary” African-Americans. But his election still came as the culmination of a trend where (white) Americans were becoming used to seeing African-Americans and Hispanics acting in high-profile political positions.

Besides his parental background, Obama also grew up in a multicultural setting as he spent some of his childhood in Indonesia. Much has been said about the rise of Asia (most of it nonsense), but Obama still unlike any earlier US president has a first-hand experience of one of the major Asian cultures.

When he entered office in January 2009, Obama was in many ways untested. Unlike most other US presidents in the past century he had not held executive office at either state or federal level and he had only been a US senator for little less than four years. Some of the hype around Obama was also exaggerated: His performance at the 2008 presidential election was convincing but given the state of the US economy not outstanding. In fact, the outcome of the 2008 election pretty much matched the predictions based on historical evidence about the correlation between the state of the economy and vote shares for incumbent and opposition candidates.¹

Still, Obama started off on a high note enjoying good approval ratings during the first half of 2009. Then the mood changed and for much of 2010 his approval ratings have looked like those of George W. Bush in the early part of his second term. Bush, of course, would plunge to even worse values and following the disaster of the 2010 mid-term elections, avoiding the fate of George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter or, for that matter, Herbert Hoover and becoming a single-term president is Obama’s main political problem.

But, we may ask, didn’t Obama deliver?

Yes and no.

Despite the attempts by the Republican party to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, there can be no doubt that Obama succeeded where previous Democratic presidents failed: He did promise to introduce a general health care reform and even if the programme included in the Affordable Care Act is in many ways complicated and opaque, he delivered on his promise. Sure, he had the benefit of working with a comfortable majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives which meant that Republican attempts at sabotaging the legislative process eventually failed. Should Obama lose at the 2012 election, health care reform will be his legacy and given the quirks and dysfunctionalites of the US political system, this has in face been an impressive performance.

The undoing of Obama and the Democratic party has been the economy. The 2008-2009 recession was the longest and deepest in the US since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the continuing poor employment figures indicates that the Obama administration so far hasn’t succeeded in finding the proper response to the fundamental problems in the US economy.

There may be many reasons for this. In the past two decades the US has increasingly turned into a plutocracy where the 1 percent (or perhaps even 0.1 percent) at the top of the income distribution have reaped the gains while the traditional middle classes in particular have witnessed a stagnation in economic development. Wall Street has managed to avoid taking the responsibility for its role in the process leading up to the 2008 collapse. Economic policy both before and after 2008 has been designed to benefit the super-rich and the middle classes have responded with frustration and anger.

The Democrats never really managed to tap into this frustration and engineer an electoral realignment. Instead, the Club for Growth and later the Tea Party have managed to channel frustrations into anti-government sentiment. To outside observers it is as if the Democratic leaders have never really understood the nature of their opponent: These days an incoherent Democratic coalition is facing a slick, tightly organised and politically radical Republican Party. The Democrats rely on luck, the Republicans on organisation.

Curiously, just as Obama may be the most American of presidents, the Republican Party of 2010 is in many ways the most European party the US has ever seen in terms of organisational and ideological cohesion.

The Obama balloon still has little under two years to take off again. The question is if the Obama administration, which is now facing a hostile House of Representatives and the tiniest of majorities in the Senate, will be able to design and implement a sustainable economic policy which will benefit working and middle class Americans.

1. On the other hand it may be argued that Al Gore in 2000 and George W. Bush in 2004 both underperformed. Gore due to a lacklustre campaign and Bush due to the controversies surrounding the Iraq war. [↩]

What could possibly be worse than losing an election?

Try winning one.

This, in the shortest possible words, was what happened to the FDP in Germany and its chairman Guido Westerwelle. Last October, the party recorded its best performance at a federal election since 1949, but within a year two-thirds of the voters had disappeared and Westerwelle is facing demands for his resignation.

As the old poet said: Himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt.

Some aspects of the collapse in the support for FDP may seem slightly odd as Westerwelle could hardly be said to be an unknown factor in German national politics. He had been secretary general of the party between 1994 and 2001, an MdB since 1996 and party chairman since 2001. In 2005 he ran on the promise of forming a government with CDU/CSU and everybody – everybody! – expected such a coalition to emerge from the 2009 election.

On the other hand, much of what made Westerwelle a well-known figure in German politics and public life, may not have been what would make a German statesman. In earlier campaigns he had devised a number of high-profile stunts which did give him a lot of attention – project 18,¹ appearing as a surprise guest in a German version of Big Brother, the Guidomobil – but whose relevance for the urgent political problems of the day was often rather oblique. Westerwelle was the main exponent of what the Germans call “Spassgesellschaft”. Maybe somebody forgot to tell him that the 2008 financial crisis meant that it was – to use another German phrase – “Schluss mit Lustig”.

And given his track record Westerwelle was just about the last person who should complain about German society reflecting late-Roman decadency.

But FDP’s problems go beyond Westerwelle. The party has always been torn between at lest two factions – one market-liberal and one political-liberal (social-liberal is slightly misleading, we are talking about the support for what Germans would call the Rechtsstaat and civic rights) – and it has always been a party lobbying for business interests. This is acceptable for a party with 6-8 percent of the vote. 15 percent – and we are in a completely different ballgame even if (or perhaps especially when) many of the new voters were on loan from CDU and CSU. Westerwelle and the FDP leadership still haven’t learnt the implications of this lesson. It takes more than lowered VAT for hotels to maintain support for a party. Add an incomprehensible sickness insurance reform and voters leave in droves.

As said in the introduction, there are calls for Westerwelle’s resignation as party chairman. The problem is that the only alternative party grandees have come up with is Trade and Industry Minister Rainer Brüderle. Just to illustrate: Let us for the sake of argument imagine that Søren Pind had been the chairman of the Danish Conservatives only to be replaced by Bendt Bendtsen after an internal rebellion. A fascinating prospect.

Party activists argue that Westerwelle, like Hans-Dietrich Genscher, could continue as foreign minister after stepping down as party leader but it is questionable if this is a workable solution. After all, Genscher had been foreign minister in ten years and made his mark on European and global politics. Westerwelle … well, there is the hotel VAT …

1. Given the German history, the name Project 18 was inappropriate as 1 signifies the letter A and 8 the letter H [↩]

Whatever can be said about the Danish Conservatives, they sure know how to make us laugh.

Exhibit 1: Lars Barfoed.

a. Was this cleared with your chairman?
b. Who says you will have a choice?

Exhibit 2: Brian Mikkelsen.

a. Is this a threat or a promise?
b. Who says … oh well

Exhibit 3: Billy Adamsen.

Actually, there are people arguing that none other that Billy A’s former boss, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen leaked these letters. How about that for a letter of recommendation.

Strictly speaking, Mona Sahlin wasn’t a lead balloon of 2010. The Sahlin balloon had already begun leaking visibly sometime during 2008 and to anyone – except people like me – it was obvious during the early part of 2010 that the Swedish Social Democrats had been in serious trouble for some time. In the end, the Social Democrats were extremely lucky to remain the largest party in Sweden after the elections in September 2010.

The post-mortems have pointed to a number of reasons why Sahlin and the Social Democrats after cruising through 2007 and much of 2008 failed completely during the latter part of the 2006-2010 parliamentary term. Sahlin may have been the wrong leader for the Social Democrats but her leadership also revealed a number of challenges to the Social Democrats which the party has to find responses to if it wants to re-emerge as a contender in Swedish politics.

One thing which struck me about the aftermath of the 2006 election was the lack of a serious evaluation of what had led to the Social Democratic defeat in 2006 as well as a real test of the candidates for the position of party leader. Oh, wait … what happened was that there was no competition: Names were mentioned but in the end Mona Sahlin just sort of became party leader.¹ And after all, polls showed that the Social Democrats had bounced back – and then some – after September 2006.²

If I look at the various comments following the 2010 collapse in Social Democratic support, several factors are in play and the party needs to address all of them in several ways:

1. Swedish society anno 2010 is nothing like Sweden of the 1960s or the 1930s. The rural-industrial society has given way for an urban service economy. But the Social Democrats are struggling with making inroads into the modern urban society. And even if the challenge from the Sweden Democrats is limited, the SweDems aim for those nostalgic about the old rural-industrial culture.

2. The curious lack of attachment with modern society is reflected in the party organisation which still relies heavily on internal recruitment. Exchanges with outside society is too limited. From the 1930s until the 1990s Social Democracy lived in a sort of symbiosis with the Swedish state but these days the party needs to build its own competences independently of the state.

3. Despite all talk of the Swedish Moderates going to the centre, there are still basic differences between the Moderate and the Social Democratic conception of how a welfare state should be organised. The problem for the Social Democrats is to make their model attractive for white-collar groups – traditional class-based arguments and painting the Moderates as representatives for the upper class no longer work.

4. Strategically, the Social Democrats were stuck between a centrist line and the desire to create a left-wing bloc to compete with the Alliance. One problem was that many voters the Left Party carried the same negative associations as the Sweden Democrats – even if the reasons for avoiding the Left Party were different, the alliance still discouraged potential white-collar and middle-class voters.

5. Sweden was hit by the international financial crisis during 2008 – but unlike what was the case in a number of other countries, the government benefited from the crisis while the Social Democrats lost. Traditionally, the Social Democrats led the centre-right with regard to economic competence. These days, this is no longer so.

6. It is hard to evaluate Sahlin’s efficacy as party leader given the structural and organisational factors. Still, I think that the party would have benefited from an open challenge before the 2007 party conference where candidates were forced to present their long-term plans for the party and their strategies.

7. Much has been said about Sahlin’s lack of analytical powers. Some of this may be due to grudges going back to the 1990s and some to prejudices against women, but Sahlin never really came across as somebody with a vision and a comprehensive set of strategies to implement it in everyday politics. We need a little more than butlers in the metro.

8. In 2010-2011, the party looks set to repeat the mistakes of 2006-2007. Recruiting a new party leader will be an internal process, controlled by the party’s executive committee. The difference is that this time, nobody can name a likely candidate as Sahlin’s successor.

PS: Some links to reports by and about the Social Democrats and their performance in the 2010 election can be found here and here.

My posts on Mona Sahlin can be found under this tag.

1. See the posts on “Mona Sahlin – Curb your enthusiasm [↩]
2. If you don’t believe me, just go to the page “Political Reviews” and check my series on “Instant failure” [↩]

It is always tricky to evaluate a political debate and predict the effects and in the case of the Løkke vs. Søvndal even more so, because viewers had the opportunity to watch the women’s handball match between Denmark and Russia.

What we should remember is that these debates in general rarely move voters, but serve to mobilise supporters.

So what we had was Lars Løkke Rasmussen (again) rejecting the conclusions in the Audit Office’s report and using the health policies (as portrayed by Liberal campaigners for the last decade) of the 1990s as his main arguments. Taken directly, Søvndal didn’t kill off Løkke but as the debate was more about the past than future health policy Løkke didn’t manage to get at the inconsistencies in SF’s policies. On the positive side for Løkke, he avoided using technocratic lingo ad libitum. Søvndal on the other hand didn’t have to address specific numbers.

As I understand the polls, the government has a general problem because it doesn’t lead the opposition on health policy any more. Despite Løkke’s reasonably good performance, I doubt that today’s debate did much to change this.

The thing is: It is not immediately obvious who will be Dennis Weaver and who will be the demonic truck in tonight’s duel between Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Villy Søvndal even if Løkke was the one calling the fight and determining the setting (with the friendly assistance of TV2 News, headed by his former spin doctor).

Some interesting points:

1. We’ve had “duels” between Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Helle Thorning Schmidt as well as between Helle Thorning Schmidt and Pia Kjærsgaard. Now Lars Løkke and Villy Søvndal. The challenges go in all directions – which probably mirrors the movements among voters between the Liberals, the Social Democrats, the Danish People’s Party and SF.

2. A number of the smaller parties have been left out in these rounds – the Conservatives, the Social Liberals, Liberal Alliance and the Red-Green Alliance. I would expect the first three to form one cluster of voter movements while the RG’s mainly compete with SF.

3. Villy Søvndal is not famous for being strong on facts. Løkke is – often too much for his own good. On the other hand it is obvious by now that Løkke Rasmussen has a bad case as he withheld information about the deals made with private hospitals.

4. Much have been made about the recent decline in support for SF in opinion polls. Perhaps we should remember that a) 2007 was a very good result for SF in a historical perspective, b) the party may be covering a very diverse section of the electorate, c) we should never mistake polls of the public mood for voting intention and d) the Social Democrats are still flat-lining.

In any event, I’ll try an live-tweet my impressions tonight at twitter.com/jacobchr.

These days anybody can be an armchair expert on terrorism so here are, for what they are worth, my first impressions about the bombings in Stockholm yesterday:

1. Generally, the motive behind suicide attacks has been a grudge against a real or perceived military intervention or occupation of the home country. The point to remember is that suicide bombings are not particularly Muslim or Islamist in nature: The Tamil Tigers made great use of the tactic during the Sri Lankan civil war.

2. That said, we do need some kind of religious factor to explain why a Swedish-Iraqi would mount a suicide attack in Sweden. Afghanistan is the best link here. This also means that intelligence services in all countries which participate in military missions in Afghanistan are or should be looking out for individuals or groups planning similar attacks. Sweden may have been a high-odds country for an attack, but there would still be odds on an attack happening in Sweden.

3. Little is (officially) known about the man, except that he was an Iraqi refugee who came to Sweden in the early 1990s. We do not (yet) know how or where his radicalisation took place or if the attack was an individual action or planned in cooperation with an extremist Islamist group or network in Sweden or elsewhere.

4. Guessing from the reports it looks like that the plan of the bomber was to mount a double attack by blowing up his car and himself either at the same time or with a slight delay. Something (fortunately) appears to have gone completely wrong in the process so the bomber became the only victim. It could be either technical incompetence or the simple fact that he couldn’t go through with his original plan – somewhere I’ve seen research which shows that there are substantial mental blocks which have to be overcome before an individual is able to carry out an attack against other people (including suicide attacks).

5. We should consider a similar type of attack possible in Denmark. But you are still much much more likely to get killed by a lorry in the traffic than by an Islamist suicide bomber.

6. Warning against specific attacks is extremely difficult because of the risk of false positives. Too many warnings will lead to complacency among the public.

7. Generally, nurturing a culture of victimhood is not very constructive. This applies in general as well as to Islamists even if (or especially because) modern Islamism in many ways is built on the premise that the Muslim world is the victim of Western aggression.

8. Despite claims to the opposite, terrorists do not “only have to be lucky once” in order to win. It is true that they have to be lucky in the sense that a number of obstacles have to be overcome and that many attempted attacks are abandoned or thwarted, but the dream of the Big Attack Which Brings Down the Evil Opponent Forever is a chimera because it does not understand the difference between general and specific support for any social or political order. In practice, extremist thinking has been found to be defective in this sense at least since the late 19th century.

Update 2010-12-15: Scandinavian-readers might want to read this post by Andreas Johansson Heinö on the Stockholm bomber and the political implications.

Auch!

We should add that the government (and the Liberals in particular) appears to have lost the advantage with regard to health care and education.

On the other hand, we should – as always – be careful when there are big changes in a poll from one month to the next and also remember that opinion polls are snapshots of the mood, not predictions.