Politics in Sweden: What the latest polls mean for Sweden's small parties

In a parliamentary system such as that of Sweden, which is based on coalition, collaboration and often minority governments, the small parties are key players.

You may think that the Social Democrats, Sweden Democrats and Moderates as the three biggest parties hold most of the power, but said power is granted (or lost) by the king-makers of the Left, Centre, Christian Democrat, Green and Liberal parties.

That’s why such much media time is given to the performance of the small parties and whether or not they will gather enough votes in future elections to get into parliament (in Sweden parties need at least four percent of the vote), even though they usually do.

And that’s why it will surely come as a worry to the current right-wing government that two of their coalition partners – the Christian Democrats and Liberals – are hovering below or dangerously close to the four-percent threshold according to several polls.

The Liberals have been through their fair share of internal turmoil in recent years, with current leader Johan Pehrson taking over at the helm of the party just a few months before last year’s election to bring them back from the brink at the eleventh hour.

But the Pehrson effect appears to have worn off, with the Liberals languishing at 2.8 percent in a new survey by pollsters Sifo on behalf of the SvD newspaper.

And more and more high-profile names are leaving the party. Last week, Cecilia Malmström – a popular former minister and EU commissioner – followed former party leader Bengt Westerberg and former minister Birgitta Ohlsson in quitting the party.

Malmström did not want to speak in depth about her reasons for leaving as a member, but conceded that her decision came in response to the Tidö Agreement – a deal which enabled the government to take power with the help of the far-right Sweden Democrats.

Is Pehrson right, as he told SVT, that the liberal wins from the Tidö Agreement are worth the concessions they’ve had to make – or do the drop in the polls and the departure of several of the party’s brightest stars show that they sold out too soon?

There’s quiet grumbling within the Christian Democrats too about Ebba Busch’s leadership, if reports by Expressen are to be believed. The party is currently polling close to the threshold (above or below depending on the poll), but what’s sparked the latest questions about Busch is her absence from a recent televised party leader debate.

She went on a sudden two-week holiday without informing the party committee or SVT, which organised the debate, and her replacement, deputy leader Jakob Forssmed did well. Very well in fact, and his focus on “soft” values such as health inequality, housing benefits and the positive aspects of immigration apparently left some within the party wondering whether it should return to those roots rather than Busch’s tougher stance.

It is however unlikely that anyone would try to challenge Busch, and the Christian Democrats’ current troubles are a headache rather than – as for the Liberals – a crisis.

What about the small opposition parties? The Left Party is showing a reasonably solid performance at eight percent-ish, which will be welcome news to Nooshi Dadgostar who failed to attract as many new voters as the party had hoped in the last election.

But the Green Party and Centre Party are both polling dangerously close to the threshold. The former’s popularity has been so lukewarm in recent years that one can only imagine they must be used to it by now, but the latter would surely have hoped from a new-party-leader-boost from Muharrem Demirok, who took over in February.

Also in Swedish politics:

Sweden's Migration Agency is to scrap the fast-track certified system and instead launch new international recruitment units, Sweden Democrat leader Jimmie Åkesson wrote in an opinion piece that “multiculturalism leads to deteriorating welfare, division, conflicts and crime”, former parliamentary speaker Urban Ahlin has been appointed Sweden’s new ambassador to the United States, and Schools Minister Lotta Edholm has criticised the National Agency for Education’s strategy for using digital tools in preschools.

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