Swedish PM calls first snap vote in 50 years after far-right force budget defeat

Friday, 5 December 2014 01:29 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Reuters: Sweden called its first snap election for more than half a century in March after a far-right party helped defeat the centre-left minority government’s first budget in parliament on Wednesday. Formed after a fractured September election that handed the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats the balance of power, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s Social Democrat-Green coalition has been widely viewed as Sweden’s weakest government in decades. Shunned by mainstream parties, the Sweden Democrats have threatened to make Sweden effectively ungovernable unless the country adopts tough immigration policies like those of nearby Denmark, including a 90% cut in asylum seeker numbers. Lofven blamed the four centre-right parties which made up the previous, long-running Alliance government for giving the Sweden Democrats, who won 13% of the vote in September, an effective veto. “They are allowing the Sweden Democrats to dictate the terms of Swedish politics,” Lofven said. Fresh elections would “let voters make a choice in the face of this new political landscape,” he added. Mattias Karlsson, acting leader of the Sweden Democrats, whose votes tipped the scale on Wednesday, said: “Our ambition is to make sure this election campaign ... becomes a referendum for or against increased immigration.” The four-party Alliance said the political turmoil showed how the centre-left coalition had been ill prepared to rule. “What we have witnessed today is the train-wreck of the centre-left cooperation,” Liberal party leader Jan Bjorklund told a news conference. The crisis has shaken the image of a country often held up as a paragon of political and economic stability. The rise of the Sweden Democrats has threatened to break a decades-old agreement across the political spectrum on an open door policy for refugees. Former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has called Sweden a ‘humanitarian superpower’. Sweden was the biggest per-capita recipient of asylum seekers and refugees last year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Markets took the political storm in their stride. The crown strengthened on the day and the Stockholm all share index closed around 1% higher. Analysts have warned a new vote will not necessarily produce a stable majority government of either centre-left or centre-right given the continued refusal of any of the three groups to cooperate with each other.