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But at this point it is fair to ask what went wrong and how big the risks that the Social Democrats will repeat their mistakes. To do so, it will be an idea to look at the challenges, routines and solutions facing or available to the Social Democrats at four different levels and how the party responded and used the available alternatives.

The Social Level
There can be no doubt that the Social Democrats are structurally challenged. The party’s historical base was the numerous smaller and mid-sized communities which again formed the basis of industrial development during the 20th century but the Swedish society has changed as the major cities have become the main economic centres and the population is migrating to the Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö/Lund and Linköping/Norrköping regions. Crucially, the Social Democrats lost the fight against the Conservatives in Stockholm and Skåne in 2006 and again in 2010. Magnus Hagevi discussed this in a recent blog post but I would like to elaborate a bit on his argument by adding the shares of the vote won by the Left Party and the Green Party (I also begin my graph in 1970 rather than 1968)

It is obvious that the Social Democrats are facing a long-term decline in their share of the vote: While the party could operate with a target of 45 percent until the mid-1980s, its target share has been around 40 percent until 2006 and these days 35 percent looks like a more reasonable target. This means I am assuming that the party was performing below its potential in 2010 – and this assumption may not necessarily be correct. But another point is that “the left” is not necessarily weaker because of the Social Democratic crisis – the Left Party and the Green Party could attract voters, even if the Sweden Democrats continue to pull working-class voters to the right; a development Andreas Johansson Heinö has hightlighted (and which has parallels in Denmark)

The Institutional Level
Some years ago, the political scientist Ellen Immergut pointed to an overlooked factor which helped the Social Democrats to maintain their political hegemony from the 1930s until the 1970: The Swedish constitutions. Curiously, the democratisation of the constitution in the form of the abolition of the indirectly elected First Chamber and changes to the electoral system. Immergut’s conclusion is that – depending on your point of view – the Social Democrats punched above their weight until 1970 or that the party would have been stronger on the parliamentary arena, had the two-chamber system been retained.

We should note that the Danish Social Democracy faced similar challenges on the electoral and parliamentary level in the 1970s, so a different institutional development wouldn’t have stopped the Social Democrats from sliding into a crisis but we could have seen a different trajectory.

The Organisational Level
The Swedish Social Democrats have always taken pride in having a strong organisational culture. Outsiders might question the conflict between the image of a grass-roots movement on the one hand and the reality of a top-down controlled machine on the other but the party for a long time succeeded in creating the impression of an organisation without visible conflicts.

The problem is that a strong organisational culture which punish deviating opinions and open conflicts is bound to run into trouble when the environment changes or when conflicts emerge. In reality, there are only two ways to deal with this situation: Either let a dominant leadership decide the course and accept that dissidents are either excluded or leave or find some way of making conflict and conflict-resolution legitimate. The Social Democrats did neither following the Göran Persson’s resignation and this effectively meant that the party was drifting, despite the good intentions of Mona Sahlin. The closed nature of the process behind the selection of first Mona Sahlin and later Håkan Juholt only served to disguise the cracks in the walls of the building.

The Individual Level
At some point during the autumn of 2011 it was obvious that Håkan Juholt wasn’t the man to lead the Social Democrats out of their misery, but what was wrong? As the Swedish magazine Fokus has pointed out, Juholt’s first problem was that he represented the countryside and small towns, rather than the Stockholm centre. He was an outsider – not just because he hadn’t been a minister – and to succeed, he would need to create a stable power base in the party’s central organs. It was not necessarily wrong to pick an outsider, but the Social Democrats managed to pick a leader who looked more like a throwback to the Sweden of the 1970s than somebody who could finally bring the party into the 21st century.

Juholt’s second problem was that he lacked the basic skills needed in a party leader and especially one whose task would be to bring about major political and organisational change. Commentators have noted his carelessness with facts and controversial private life but to me, Juholt is fascinatingly like a Danish party leader who enjoyed great success in his first five years in office despite a certain erratic element. Yes, I am talking about Villy Søvndal – the traditionalist who transformed SF into a lean and mean electoral and parliamentary machine and who between 2005 and 2010 couldn’t make serious mistakes (What has happened from 2010 onward is a different story). Søvndal’s advantage was in seizing the moment when SF was ripe for organisational reform and creating a team (Ole Sohn in the Folketing and Thor Möger Petersen and – until his early death – Jakob Nørhøj in the party organisation) which could support him in a competent way. Juholt essentially was an agitator – and by all accounts a good one – but lacked the strategic and organisational skills. His team turned out to be just as erratic as the chairman, something which put the final nails in the coffin of Juholt’s leadership.

Postscript: For a number of bad reasons it has taken me ages to finish this post. in the meantime, the Social Democrats’ Executive Committee (which is no longer deferentially referred to as “the powerful Executive Committee”) has installed the leader of the Metal Workers’ Union Stefan Löfven as new/interim/whatever party leader. Lövfen is not an MP, something which highlights the party’s problems with attracting talent at the top levels.

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But here is a thought for the week-end: Let us imagine that the challenger to Fredrik Reinfeldt for the office of Prime Minister in Sweden had to be chosen though some kind of primary and we had Håkan Juholt and Jonas Sjöstedt as the contenders

A) Who would win?

and

B) Who would Reinfeldt’s team see as the more dangerous opponent?

The thing is: I can ask the question without being considered completely crazy and the answer – well, maybe the answer is obvious to most readers.

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The EMU raises a number of political and economic issues. Basically, there were two arguments for the monetary union: First, it should facilitate trade in the EU; second, it should help create a common identity. The question here is if the EMU and the single currency were and are necessary conditions for reaching either goal – even if we should also be critical of developments on the financial markets, they have come up with a number of instruments designed to lower the costs of currency fluctuations during the past thirty years and as for bank notes as a means of creating identity, well, yes and no. The Deutschmark-nationalism is a well-known fact.

Back in the early 1990s, I found the technicalities of the entire adventure hard to grasp even if I actually attended a lecture where Niels Thygesen explained the process and the institutional set-up. Maybe I was theoretically challenged, maybe Thygesen wasn’t a master of didactics or maybe there was some kind of flaw in the political set-up. Still, all things considered I thought the Maastricht package was better than letting what was then the EC go sideways.

In 2003, I had some more specific issues with the EMU. In 2000 the Danish Economic Council had more or less destroyed the basis of the “yes”-campaign by pointing out that joining the EMU had no economic benefits for Denmark – an important part of the reason was that the Danish currency had been pegged to the D-Mark and later the proto-Euro since 1982 – and that membership was a purely political question. We would have expected Danish politicians to receive this conclusion enthusiastically but the problem is that Danish EU-politics in general has relied on de-politicising issues related to Europe. Similarly, monetary policy has been depoliticised in most Western countries since the 1980s by handing over competences to the national reserve banks.

The situation in Sweden was – and is – slightly different, as the Swedish currency has been floating since the mid-1990s so technically Sweden has some degrees of freedom with regard to monetary policy which Denmark do not have.

In any case voters are a curious bunch: They do not like “politics” but on the other hand they do not like the idea of not having any actual influence on central political issues – such as economic growth and employment.

And this was one major problem with the EMU: It is copied on the (West-)German post-war tradition of fiscal and monetary policy which basically states that employment and economic growth are subordinate to price stability, so if you adopt the EMU, you also make a political choice which not everybody would agree in.

Another problem is that EMU assumes that economic development in all member countries follows the same economic cycle. This raises the question what happens when some countries are going through an economic slump while others are in a boom. The EMU does not have the instruments to deal with this situation, except banning countries with weak growth from boosting their economies. There are more problems, but this will illustrate the political-economic-institutional corner the EMU countries risked painting themselves into.

Finally there was the question about governance in the EMU. Having guidelines is all very well, but problems arise when they are not followed. A more thorough examination of Greece’s political and economic institutions would probably have kept the country out of the EMU to the benefit of both Greece and the EMU. Similarly, France and Germany forced the EMU to bend its rules with regard to deficits and debt in the early 2000s.

Add a major global economic slump and the EMU vehicle is very likely to hit the wall in a violent matter. We are now in a situation where four or five EMU countries are facing a choice between a decade of severe austerity and slow (if any) growth on the one hand or leaving the EMU suffering the penalties of the financial markets. This is a recipe for severe social disorder: 2012 may not be 1932 but politicians and bureaucrats would still do well to remember the name “Heinrich Brüning”, the German chancellor whose technocratic austerity policies led Germany to the brink of civil war.

At the same time, politicians are slowly recognising that the existing political-economic institutions are inadequate and have to be amended. But, first, passing institutional reforms in the multi-level EU system is notoriously tricky, and, second, the process has already revealed the cracks in the relationships between EU countries. It is not outlandish to consider the possibility of the UK leaving the EU or the Eurozone breaking up into two or more parts.

So to conclude: What the EU needs now is not another patchwork agreement (even if the Union has to muddle through in the short and medium term) but a reassessment of the raison d’être of a political and monetary union and the adequacy of its institutions.

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Many would probably see the main characters Saga Norén and Martin Rohde as national stereotypes with Norén as the formalistic, rule-oriented Swede and Rohde as the laid-back Dane, but if you have worked in both countries things are a bit more complicated. In fact, Norén (minus the sex bit) looks very much as the embodiment of the traditional Danish public bureaucracy which was excessively rule-oriented while Swedish public administration (just like Rohde) has a tradition of being oriented towards negotiations, consensus and the logic of appropriateness.

Of course, one shouldn’t make too much of a dramaturgical tool but the contrast between stereotypes and reality is fascinating.

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Just to continue a line of thought from my previous note: The question about populist parties presenting themselves as “the true Social Democrats”.

The issue may be more relevant in Denmark and Sweden where support for the Social Democrats has taken a hit while the Danish People’s Party and to a lesser extent the Sweden Democrats have gained. Commentators have pointed out that SweDem have played the “real Social Democrats” card by trying to gain ownership of the “Folkhem” concept. As it is, “Folkhem” has a complicated history (it is in many ways a word which lends itself to discourse analysis) being first a Conservative and later a Social Democratic slogan. “Folkhem” also points to the development where Social Democracy changed from being an internationalist to an essentially nationally oriented political movement with the creation of the welfare states in the Scandinavian countries from the 1930s onward as the best-know effect.

Welfare state researchers will note that the national welfare state model probably reached its peak around 1980 (the period used by Gösta Esping-Andersen in his seminal book “Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism”) but that internationalisation and Europeanisation since then has put the national models of welfare under pressure. “Multiculturalism” and “Structural change” do not carry the same emotional weight as “Folkhem”: They are, at best, technocratic terms.

However, we should be careful in focussing too much on the word “Folkhem” as it is a uniquely Swedish term. Danish has no equivalent – “welfare state” is the closest – and this points to the risk of generalising Swedish experiences. As it is, the “welfare state” only really emerged as a political term during the 1960s in Denmark and it was fiercely debated in the 1960s and 1970s. To use discourse analysis-speak, the hegemony of the “welfare state” was less obvious than the hegemony of the “folkhem”.

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I spent last week in Vaasa (or Vasa, in Swedish; the town is officially bilingual) participating in a workshop on populist parties. The work was quite intensive with five official sessions and no less than two dinners and here are some of my thoughts after the discussions:

1. Dealing with “the populist parties” in the Nordic countries as a group is problematic for a number of reasons, most notably because of the lack of formal links between the Danish People’s Party (DF), the Sweden Democrats (SD), Fremskrittspartiet (FrP) and Perussuomalaiset (PS) – DF and SD have shown an interest in creating some kind of ties, though – but also because FrP in particular occupy a different position in the political space compared to DF, SD and PS. FrP in many ways look more like a conservative party with more liberal positions on economy while DF, SD and PS all combine an economically centrist position with an authoritarian position on social issues (immigration and crime as the most notable issues).

2. Several of us implicitly or explicitly addressed questions related to the institutionalisation of populist parties in the Nordic party systems. Even if SD and – to some degree PS – are newcomers, all parties were established in the 1970s (FrP) or 1990s (DF, SD, PS) and while it is still difficult to predict the future strength of PS and SD, we should expect them to stay in the national party systems for some time. We should also note that the parties have led deliberate strategies to stabilise the party organisations on the membership and parliamentary level (A colleague noted that DF’s organisational practices in many ways resembled those of communist parties with a very strong and centralised leadership).

3. Two concepts often associated with populism were spectacular absent from the discussions: Charisma and distrust. There are many good reasons why charisma has fallen out of favour in academic discussions – the concept is hard to operationalise and the institutionalisation processes I described above make references to the party leaders’ charisma less relevant.

I am less certain about distrust. If we look at electoral research, populist party voters usually stand out with low levels of political and social trust compared with other voters. The phenomenon of distrust is not uncomplicated – a Danish research project from the 1990s argued that conflicts between elite and majority positions on the one hand and minority positions on specific issues on the other may generate distrust. Immigration and European policy were cited as the most likely sources of political distrust back then. That distrust disappeared from view has to do with the perspective changing from (voter) demand to (party) supply but this is probably where you write: “More research is needed”.

4. Marie Demker has argued that populist parties are better understood as nationalist parties. The argument is interesting as it sees nationalism as the ideological basis which sets these parties apart from other parties in the Nordic party systems. The argument would also fit with the parties’ position on the libertarian-authoritarian scale. Here populism could be seen as a means used by nationalist parties (and other parties – think of Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s famous New Year’s Speech from 2002) to mobilise voters.

If I should argue against Demker’s thesis I would first of all acknowledge that the present-day DF and SD (and in all likelihood PS) unquestionably qualify as nationalist. If we look at the Danish political history, nationalist agrarianism has manifested itself at certain points during the 20th century (The Free People’s Party, later the Peasants’ Party 1934-1945 and the Independents 1960-1966) but so has an outspoken anti-state populism (The Justice Party 1926-1960, 1973-1975, 1977-1981) and I would question if the Progress Party of the 1970s could reasonably be seen as a nationalist party. Again, more research would be necessary here. We should also consider if the peasant populism that we know from the 1930s and 1970s can be meaningfully compared with the working-class populism of the 1990s (in the case of Denmark: 1970s) onward.

One way of reconciling the “liberal” populism of the 1970s and the “nationalist” populism of the 1990s could be to focus on the European dimension. We know that the EC and later EU has been a continued source of problems for the Social Democratic parties in the Nordic countries with the parties being split between internationalism and welfare-state nationalism.

5. One final round of discussions, linked with #4, had to do with populist parties presenting themselves as “the true Social Democrats”. Both SD and DF have used this line of argument with the 1950s as some kind of imagined Social Democratic ideal (something which most people who were adults or adolescents during that decade would probably question) with the post 1968-Social Democracy presented as traitors to the national Social Democratic idea. This calls for some further arguments which I will leave for later.

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That Maud Olofsson would step down as leader as the Centre Party was not that surprising (after all, she has been party leader for a decade now) but both the process and the possible outcomes will give Helgeandologues plenty to talk about. Olofsson was a significant figure as she anchored the Centre Party in the centre-right bloc and was instrumental in forming and sustaining “the Alliance”. On the other hand, her tenure also effectively saw the party abandon the attempts to break (back) into the urban electorate and lowering its environmental profile. So the problems facing the party is if it should be a niche party concentrating on (rural) small entrepreneurs, a party for the Swedish periphery or somehow reinvent itself as a liberal party. The two names mentioned at the moment – Annie Johansson and Anna-Karin Hatt – probably point in the first and third directions. Exactly how the fight for the party leadership will be performed – an open competition or a behind-closed-doors valberedning – remains to be seen.

Lars Ohly has had a rough ride as leader of the Left Party. Ohly was always a man of the traditional left-wing of the labour movement identifying with the party’s communist past where the in many ways erratic but also engaging Gudrun Schyman managed to broaden the party’s image in the same way leaders of the Danish SF have done since the 1970s. Ohly and his political line was probably one of the reasons why the tentative coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Left Party blew up in the 2010 campaign so the question is if and how the next leader will move back towards the line followed by Schyman. So far we have two candidates: Jonas Sjöstedt (who is generally described as a modernizer even if he also has blue-collar credentials) and Ulla Andersson who is probably closer to Ohly politically.

Let us add that the Social Democrats have a new chairman, who so far appear to be more of a traditionalist appealing to the party’s blue collar base, that the Green Party has a new set of party leaders and that the Christian Democratic leader Göran Hägglund is not out of the mire and we face the possiblity of changes in political positions and strategies among five of the eight parties in the Swedish Riksdag.

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Things can be bad enough in a post-religious society, but if you have a multi-religious society, they tend to become really complicated: Judaism, Christianity and Islam all divide the week in six working-days and one day of rest and religious worship. (In)Conveniently, the three religions disagree over which day should be the day of worship – Muslims opt for Friday, Jews for Saturday and Christians for Sunday. And then we have the various special holidays which differ between religions (this also includes Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity). Add Buddhists and Hindus to the picture and things become extremely complicated.

It is into this mess that the new party secretary of the Swedish Social Democrats Carin Jämtin managed to kick a potential honets’ nest by proposing that the Muslim Eid el-Fitr should be made a public holiday in Sweden. In all likelihood, the proposal was well-meant but badly thought out and with a little bit of luck, the Sweden Democrats could win a substantial number of votes on the issue.

At some point Jämtin has noted that holidays which taken at face value only include some part of the population also excludes others. Christmas, for instance, has no meaning for Jews or Muslims, but there are still public holidays in late December. Similarly, the Jewish and Muslim holidays are either ignored or seen as exotic by the majority of the population. So, swapping a Christian holiday for a Muslim one should have the desired effect of boosting Muslim inclusion in Swedish society. And, needless to say, this is where I predict the Sweden Democrats will kick in. In – ahem – extreme nationalist circles the former Social Democratic leader Mona Sahlin was slandered as “Mona the Muslim” for covering her hair once when she visited a mosque. (Covering her hair – not wearing a burqa, a niqab or even a hijab.). Paul Wolfowitz at least had a pair of worn-out socks to earn him a sea of public ridicule.

That anything related to Muslim customs has a high potential for conflict in today’s Europe is a known fact. A Danish MP who organised a private Eid celebration in the restaurant of the Danish parliament became the centre of controversy with the Danish People’s Party campaigning against Muslim advances in one of the sacred places of Danish democracy. The (Liberal) speaker of the Parliament reluctantly noted that there was no way to block the party (the dinner, not the Danish People’s Party, in case you wondered). This was another low point in Danish public discourse.

But Islamophobia aside, Jämtin also has to face two questions: 1. If the Social Democrats generally want to promote a secular society, why promote new religious holidays? and 2. Why stop at Muslims? After all, there are different Christian churches which celebrate different holidays (consider the Orthodox Christmas or the various Catholic holidays, for example). And what about the Jews and Yom Kippur? Or various Hindu or Buddhist holidays? Or an Atheism Day? Some people might feel excluded.

With a bit of luck, we could have 365 holidays every year and add a Leap Day Holiday every 4th year for good measure.

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The pun is hard to translate into English but back in the late 19th century a perceptive Danish politician declared that only the sex drive (kønsdriften) was harder to control than the trains (jernbanedriften). Today, one may wonder if he was wrong. It looks increasingly as if the sex is the easy part of the equation while controlling the rail traffic is harder than ever.

The Øresundstog/DSBFirst debacle is only one of many problems which have hit Danish railways in recent years, but an over-active and somewhat erratic Minister of Transport has definitively added to the news value. On the other hand, concentrating on the specific issue may also obscure some of the more general problems with running transport infrastructure.

But to summarise: The specific problem regarding DSBFirst is one of overoptimistic budgeting and planning linked with a lack of competence in evaluating offers from the Danish and Swedish authorities which again led to regular disturbances in the traffic on the Malmö – Copenhagen – Elsinore line and (possible) cross-subsidising of the affiliate company DSBFirst by the state-owned DSB. So far, the CEO of DSB has been sacked while the chairman of the board of DSB decided to spare his health from further challenges. Interested parties are considering various Plan Bs to keep the connections running.

So the buck calls at many stations: Obviously, DSBFirst has some explaining to do but so does DSB which has a controlling stake in the company. At the same time the Danish Ministry of Transport has a double role as it formally controls DSB and (through the Transport Authority) awards the contracts on the lines which have been put up for tender. Given the formal structure of Danish public administration, the minister is the person responsible in the last instance.

To make matters worse, the person who was minister when DSBFirst’s bid for the line was prepared and accepted was the Flemming Hansen while Carina Christensen and the present Conservative leader Lars Barfoed held the portfolio during the somewhat messy period between the original accept of DSBFirst’s offer and the transfer of the service from DSB and SJ to DSBFirst. That means we have four ministers involved in the process, including one high-ranking politician. Fun.

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