Q&A: Can Sweden's Left and Centre parties overcome their deadlock?

The Local: It doesn't look so easy for the Left bloc to form a government, even if the polls come true. Why is this?

Nicholas Aylott: All four of these parties – the Social Democrats, the Left, the Greens and the Centre Party – will be needed for a left bloc majority. None of them is superfluous. And the ones at either end of the bloc – the Left Party on the left and the Centre Party on the right – really can't abide one another.

How they will together contribute to a stable majority in the Swedish parliament after the next election is still a mystery. It's this uncertainty which is causing a headache, particularly to the Social Democrats who would lead such a government. 

Earlier this month, the Left Party made a formal decision at their congress that they would not support a government that they are not themselves part of. Why is that a problem?

It's a problem for the coherence of the Left bloc because the Centre Party has established an equally vivid and clear red line ruling out certain options for the future, and one of the things it's ruled out is supporting any government that does contain the Left Party.

So the Left Party is saying that it won't support any government that it is not part of, and the Centre Party is saying that it won't support any government that the Left Party is part of, and this seems to be an impossible dilemma. 

Can we just go back in history and try and understand why the Centre Party and the Left Party hate each other so much?

I think hate is perhaps a strong word, but they do have a rather hostile relationship to one other. The Centre Party has only recently drifted from the right bloc into the left bloc. It did that because of its very deep antipathy to the possibility of the right bloc doing a deal with Sweden's newest party, the Sweden Democrats, who arrived in Parliament 2010 and still excite very, very deep hostility on the part of a lot of other actors within Swedish politics. 

The Centre Party has carved out a niche as the traditionally right-leaning party that refuses any accommodation with the Sweden Democrats, most emphatically. This is what's pulled it over towards the Left bloc.

READ ALSO: Swedish Centre Party 'will never accept a government including the Left Party

So traditionally, the Left Party and the Centre Party come from very different places. The Centre Party was traditionally the party of the farmers and it reinvented itself over the last quarter century as a very liberal party, both economically and socially. This puts it clearly at odds with the ideological background of the Left Party, which is anti-liberal, very cautious about free trade and the free market, and has customarily left-wing policies that rub up quite strongly against an economically liberal party like the Centre Party. So there's an obvious ideological clash there.

I think there's also a strategic aim that the Centre Party has. The Centre Party's interest as an aspiring government party would be best served if the blocs were broken up, and it could act as a broker between the two traditional big parties in Swedish politics – the Social Democrats on the left and the Moderates on the right. It wants to break up these blocs.  

So if it can emphasise that the extremes in Swedish politics – the Sweden Democrats on the right and the Left Party on the left are extreme and shouldn't be parleyed with under any circumstances. Then that also promotes the Centre Party's strategic goal of making itself a power broker. 

Can we just go back a bit more as to why the Centre Party became this extremely liberal party, both socially and economically? If you look at other Nordic countries, the farmers' parties are completely the opposite. They tend to be economically populist, protectionist and not free market. 

This is a very interesting question. The Centre Party in Sweden has swung to the left quite strongly in different historical eras. It formed coalitions with the Social Democrats in the 1930s and in the 1960s, and this was a much more comfortable and natural position for many in the party even up until the 1990s, when the party supported a Social Democratic minority government in 1995 that lasted for a few years.

But then after this experience – in the late 1990s – the party seemed to take a very different direction. When I started looking at the party in the 1990s, there was already an eccentric strain of ultra liberalism, particularly in its youth wing. There were a few people who were really very radical in all sorts of libertarian directions but they were pretty marginal. 

But then, after the 1998 and 2002 elections, it really seemed as if the party was facing an existential crisis. Its traditional constituency in the countryside was, for socioeconomic reasons, getting smaller and smaller, and it wasn't at all clear what the party's future would be. So I think there was a strong sense that it had to reinvent itself and in the discussion about its reinvention, the libertarian strain made itself particularly heard. 

The leader who took over in 2001, Maud Olofsson, was by no means a libertarian, but she took a strategic decision to associate the Centre Party emphatically with the right bloc and I think that was something that the libertarian strain certainly approved of and then when Annie Lööf took over in 2011, she had this libertarian background. 

It's still a very liberal economic party. It's in favour of things like freer markets, lower taxes, that sort of thing, and that makes it uncomfortable company for many in the left bloc.

After the Liberal Party agreed to join a government that includes the Sweden Democrats, the Left Party's leader, Nooshi Dadgostar, sent a letter to Elisabeth Thand Ringqvist, the leader of the Centre Party, proposing some kind of analogous deal. Why do you think she did this? 

The leadership of the Left Party seems to have really decided that it wants to change the character of the party and acquire a reputation as a potential party of government. The Left Party is one of only two parties out of the eight in the Swedish parliament that has that have never sat formally in a government.

The Social Democrats have always rather complacently relied on the Left Party for its support, but never allowed it into a coalition government and the current leadership wants to change that. It really has to make clear that either it will be part of a left-leaning government, or there won't be a left-leaning government. It is trying to promote this strategic goal of establishing itself as a party of government, not just of protest or of ideological purity. It wants to actually change things: to be a party of government. 

Why did Thand Ringqvist reject this overture? (she said, "the only party in Swedish politics that wants the Left Party in government is the Left Party") 

As far as the Centre Party is concerned, this ambition conflicts with what the Centre would like to see. It's not just a question of ideological clashes, although they're certainly important. For the Centre Party, the route to its maximal influence in government formation and Swedish politics generally, is if bloc politics can be broken up in the way that it seems to have been broken up recently in Denmark, in the way that it's never been a factor in Finland, in the way that it never really has been much of a factor in the Netherlands, and it's not really a factor in Germany. These are dream scenarios for the Centre Party and thus, it has no interest in doing a deal with the Left Party. 

So after the election – say the polls that we have at the moment more or less come to pass, maybe with the Liberals in, maybe with the Liberals kicked out of parliament. Assuming that there's no possibility of a three-party left-wing government, how likely do you think it is that either the Centre Party or the Left Party soften their red lines?

I think it's quite likely. Something's got to give, otherwise we will have a new election, and nobody will really want that. So the question is, "which of these two parties has the stronger bargaining position?", "whose threats are more credible?" And I think, quite simply, that the more credible threats come from the Centre Party. They have somewhere else to go.

They could potentially go back on their refusal to have anything to do with the Sweden Democrats. It would be a terrible embarrassment to the party leadership. It would really, really not want to do that. But potentially, it could.

Whereas the Left Party could never govern with any other constellation of parties or support any other constellation of governing parties, other than those in the left bloc, so it doesn't have anywhere else to go.

It's also the case that the red lines from the Left Party and the Centre Party are not absolutely symmetrical. The Left Party has said that it won't support any government to which it does not contribute ministers, whereas the Centre Party has left open the possibility of a minority government in which the Left Party is relegated to support party status – so a member of the underpinning majority in parliament, but without actually having seats around the cabinet table, which is a role that it's played several times previously.

That alternative, although it would involve a humiliating calling of the Left Party's bluff, I think is probably the likeliest outcome.

What about the possibility that the Christian Democrats, or perhaps the Liberal Party on the right, if they remain in parliament, would be willing to join a kind of cross-bloc government? 

As far as the Liberals are concerned, I think this is really unlikely. The Liberals have flip-flopped, as the Americans would say, several times over the last few years, so to junk all the work it's put into committing itself to the right-wing bloc and just change position again, I think, would probably be be fatal for the party. 

It's perhaps more likely that the Liberals' views become immaterial because if doesn't make it into parliament – which is still looking like a very serious possibility.

So perhaps the more interesting party to think about is the Christian Democrats. The Christian Democrats' leader, Ebba Busch, has been trying to remind people in the last few weeks and months that it is an independent decision maker, and that its support for a right-wing bloc should not be just assumed. That she has a good relationship with the Social Democrat leader and that some sort of unexpected deal between those two parties shouldn't be completely ruled out. 

I think this would be such a wrench for many in her party that it remains a very far-fetched scenario. I think she would probably still prefer four years in opposition than to take her party through a trauma like that.

What about the third possibility, which is that the Centre Party might switch sides, if after two or three rounds of negotiations, it's going absolutely nowhere, and it's like, one more vote and we have to have another election. Could the Centre Party, if it gets to that point, say, "for the good of Sweden, we are going to have to support a government with Sweden Democrat ministers?"

In a strategic sense, it makes sense for the Centre Party's leadership to keep this possibility open, without closing it too definitively, because that maximises the party's bargaining position vis-à-vis both sides. If the possibility of a return to the right is seen by the left as remotely credible, that gives the Centre Party more more bargaining power. Still, I see this as a very unlikely scenario. The Centre Party, as I said, has carved out this niche for itself as the party that is economically liberal, but also very socially liberal. 

The Centre Party has to try to maintain the level of support it has amongst the electorate and many of those will have been attracted to the party over the last ten years or so simply because of its antipathy to the Sweden Democrats. To jeopardise all that I think would be very difficult.

What do you think the Social Democrats would prefer? 

That's the other factor when we talk about this tug of war between the Centre and the Left: the preferences of the Social Democrats. Because they are going to be the biggest party in the Left Bloc by an absolute mile. It's they who will provide the prime minister. I think under Magdalena Anderson, it's likely to be a somewhat more policy-driven party that actually wants to achieve things, not just to keep the peace between its partners, and I think what it would like to do is probably more difficult in coalition with the Left Party. I think that will also militate towards the Social Democrats preferring to respect the Centre Party's red line rather than the Left Party's red line. 

So how high do you rate the chances of a Social Democrat-led government after the election?

Quite highly. I think this disunity is certainly the biggest difficulty that the left bloc faces. They all want to win, of course, but they all have their own private party agendas as well, and balancing all those will be a great challenge. But I think in these hard times, it's very difficult for an incumbent government of any colour to remain in office, and I think the chances are that we'll still see the Left bloc winning a collective majority after the next election.

And then I would guess that the Centre Party gets its way, partly because it has relatively strong bargaining power, but maybe more because the Social Democratic leadership prefers the Centre Party's red line to the Left Party's red line, and the Left Party will have to accept having its bluff called and will have to once again serve as a sort of support party to a Social Democrat-led government.

I'm not sure the Left Party wouldn't push all the way to a new election. I think they tasted blood back when they felled the Social Democrat Prime Minister Stefan Löfven back in 2021. 

This is always a possibility. But a party that induced a new election just months after an ordinary election would be taking a risk. The risk is that the voters would punish that party for forcing them back to the polls. 

Politics in Sweden is The Local’s weekly analysis, guide or look ahead to what’s coming up in Swedish politics. Update your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your inbox.