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Left Party calls for justice and equality

The Local Sweden
The Local Sweden - [email protected]
Left Party calls for justice and equality
Left Party leader Jonas Sjöstedt. Photo: Helena Landstedt/TT

Sweden's Left Party election promises focus on jobs, welfare services, and gender equality. The Local takes a closer look.

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With around 6 percent of Sweden's support, according to recent polls, the Left Party fights first and foremost for a more equal society.
 
"In the last 30 years Sweden has got worse again," the party writes on its official website.
 
"Greedy companies have been allowed to control more and more. Sweden now has high unemployment, a shortage of housing, a poorer welfare services and a less equal society."
 
The party has made it clear that it wants to be in a government together with the Social Democrats and the Green Party, although Social Democrats opposition leader Stefan Löfven has been keeping his post-election plans close to his chest.
 
 
The issue that sets the Left Party apart from the others is its intolerance of profits in the welfare sector - a topic that party leader Jonas Sjöstedt has returned to time and time again.
 
"We are the only party that wants to make it impossible for private companies to make big profits from schools, healthcare and social services," the party writes on its website.
 
Here is The Local's guide to the party's key policies:
 
Employment
  • More jobs through investments in infrastructure, housing, and climate issues
  • Jobs or training within 90 days to unemployed people under 25
  • No tax increase for low and middle income earners
  • Improve opportunities for small business owners by removing their sick pay liability
Equality and feminism
  • Raise all women's salaries to match men's
  • Ensure gender balance in leadership positions
  • Change parental insurance so parents take equal shares in looking after their children
  • Improve rape laws
Climate
  • Close two of Sweden's nuclear reactors in next mandate period
  • Improve emissions goals
  • Launch a "large-scale" test for free public transport
  • Ensure 30 percent of Sweden's agriculture is certified as organic by 2020
  • Reduce pesticide and fertilizer use by increasing taxes on them
  • Work with EU to ban dangerous chemicals
Immigration
  • Support a "generous" asylum policy
  • Ensure everyone has the right to live in peace
  • Improve asylum process for LGBT people from abroad
  • Crack down on exploitation of foreign workers in Sweden
Education
  • More jobs in schools
  • Employ 6,000 new middle-school teachers
  • Increase study support by 750 kronor per month.
  • Make all schools "equally good"
  • Fewer children in each pre-school group
  • Give responsibility of schools to the state
Health/Elderly care
  • Allow the elderly to decide more on their care
  • Add 10,000 nursing jobs
  • Improve health centres, especially in socially deprived areas
Foreign policy
  • No to the Euro
  • Ban weapon exports to dictatorships

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