Sweden’s parliament topples the government, a historic first

Last Wednesday I was having lunch with a Swedish member of parliament in the parliament’s cafeteria. Next to us, leading members of four center-right parties, two of whom support the ruling Social Democratic-Green government, were likewise having lunch and documented the occasion with a group selfie. A couple of hours later, news arrived that a vote of no confidence in the government was about to happen.

Sweden’s current government is an anomaly — but a structural anomaly. Like many previous governments, it’s led by the Social Democrats, who have ruled Sweden for decades. In recent years, though, their voter share has declined, and in the current parliament they only occupy 100 of the 349 seats. Not even aided by the votes of the Left Party (27 seats) and the Greens (16) do the Social Democrats reach the 175 seats required for a parliamentary majority. But the center-right parties don’t have a majority either: Together, the Moderates (70 seats), the Center Party (31), the Christian Democrats (22), and the Liberals (19) only have 142 seats. Their fundamental challenge is this: In recent years the Sweden Democrats (who are typically described as far-right but are less so than some of their counterparts in other countries) have rapidly gained in strength. Today they’re the third largest party in the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, with 62 seats. But until now, both the center-left and the center-right parties have said they won’t govern with the Sweden Democrats.

That makes forming a government exceptionally difficult. The last time around, after the 2018 national elections, it took Prime Minister Stefan Löfven several months to do so, and even then he only ended up with a fragile one: The Social Democrats and the Greens form a coalition supported by the Center Party and the Liberals, and the Left Party votes with the government. The Left Party has always voted with the Social Democrats on the grounds that that’s better than supporting a center-right coalition.

But shortly after my lunch in the Swedish parliament canteen, the Left Party suddenly announced it’d had enough. Feeling ignored by the government over the relatively minor issue of market rents in newly built properties, it announced it would no longer support the government. The Sweden Democrats rapidly tabled a no-confidence vote, and today — Monday, June 21 — the combined forces of the Sweden Democrats, the Moderates, the Left Party, and the Christian Democrats brought down Löfven and his cabinet. It’s the first time in Swedish history that a government has been toppled by parliament.

Löfven now faces the choice of trying to assemble a new coalition or calling new elections. Considering that the next scheduled parliamentary elections are to be held in the autumn of 2022, adding another election is clearly inconvenient, and even the parties likely to do well in such an election will struggle to assemble election manifestos and candidate lists. But cobbling together a new coalition will be challenging too — for Löfven and for any other party leader to whom the speaker of the parliament may issue the invitation. A government between elections isn’t unheard of in other European countries. In 1982, West Germany’s liberal FDP deserted the ruling Social Democrat-led coalition in favor of the Christian Democrats and the Bavarian CSU, causing Helmut Schmidt to lose the chancellorship and installing Helmut Kohl as chancellor.

Indeed, unorthodox coalitions are not unheard of in other European countries. In West Germany and now Germany, the Christian Democrats and the CSU have, time and again, teamed up in so-called Grand Coalitions with the Social Democrats, the SPD. Finland regularly assembles large coalitions whose parties may agree on little but at least have a parliamentary majority. And in Norway, Prime Minister Erna Solberg of the center-right party Høyre previously governed in a coalition with the Progress Party, which is ideologically similar to the Sweden Democrats.

If anything is clear now, it’s that Sweden’s political parties will need to part with their old tradition of only governing with ideological allies. Sure, negotiating and delivering a program for a coalition with highly divergent views is phenomenally challenging: Just watch Germany’s current grand coalition. But Sweden’s parties may come to agree that such bloc-busting coalitions are preferable to weak governments. The other alternative, of course, is to do a Solberg and govern with the Sweden Democrats.

Most voters no longer maintain a life-long association with a party. In fact, one could argue that ideology is vanishing and that issue-based voting is advancing. Either way, on this June 21 Swedish parliamentarians and voters are likely to conclude that their country’s decades-old habit of forming ideologically coherent but weak coalitions may no longer be fit for purpose.