This is an election year in Sweden, which has a 4-year election cycle. I do not follow domestic politics so much, not because it does not affect me but for the most part because it seems rather pointless. What we have is in essence a multi-party one-party state in which discussion about fundamentals never takes place. Sure, the parties have minor differences as to how the aims can be achieved, and the so-called right favour marginally lower taxes than the left, but by any objective reading all the major parties in Sweden are leftist of one form or another - believing as they do in the all-mighty state.
Elections normally bring out the true colours of a country, because it brings to the fore what the politicians regard as the selling points to the normal person in the street. So it is even in Sweden, although given that Swedish people are generally very reticent about voicing any divergent opinion, it is difficult to say whether the issues which are valued by politicians are actually the issues which the normal Swedish person values. By and large the politicians have a very easy time in Sweden because regardless of how unpopular a bill might be, it is very rare for a public outcry. The fact that most of the time the parties seem to be on the same side - and not co-incidentally this happens to be the side supported by media - tends to make Sweden a very governable place for the politicians.
There is one major party which stands out in Sweden and that is "Sverigedemokraterna" - the "Swedish democrats", directly translated. This too is a statist party, but at least when they speak they speak like normal people, as though they live on this particular planet in this particular galaxy and not on some parallel galaxy where we can pretend that crime has no victims and that we can obliterate centuries of culture through multiculturalism and come out the other side better than we were before. (I am not hereby in any way shape or form taking a stance as to whether the Swedish culture is better than a certain undefined multi-culture, merely stating that multiculturalism is an experiment doomed to failure.) This party gets predictably bad press and is frequently described as far-right, but it is in fact a leftist party for nationalists. For some reason, in Sweden, far right is supposed to be bad, which is why the media attaches that label to anyone who dislikes forcing multiculturalism down everybody's throats by way of leftism.
There is also a party started last month called "Kristna Värdepartiet" - "the Christian values party", directly translated. This party seems quite different, and in its party program it states taht it wants to recude teh influence of the state. It also wants to make the killing of the unborn illegal. On top of that, it wants to allow home-schooling (which is illegal in practice). Of all the parties I have come across in Sweden, this is as non-leftist as it gets, and can even be described as 'conservative' - that most hated of words in this country. I shall try as much as I can to report on how this party is reported.
As I wrote in my introduction, I don't follow domestic Swedish politics too much. However, during election years I do like to follow the different election strategies and keep tabs on what kind of marketing the parties are doing for themselves. So last time, for instance, we had the greens telling us that they wanted to abolish the 'traditional family' (an intrinsic evil if ever there was one), whereas the Swedish democrats rode on a platform of trying to promote it - among other things by providing free counselling to couples who are in divorce proceedings. That to me was the most striking difference of the last election, and the ability of the Swedish democrats to speak as though they value them, whereas many of the other parties see people as variables in a social experiment. That being written, the Swedish democrats did not have a very coherent platform - running as they did on the idea that Islam is the greatest threat to Sweden (which it might well be although I disagree with that assessment) since Nazism. The reason this is incoherent is because Nazism was not a threat to Sweden in any way and Sweden was in many ways a collarator and admirer of Nazism. However, we are taught to associate Nazism with evil (without necessarily being taught what was evil about it philosophically), and by associating Islam with Nazism they aimed at triggering a reflexive reaction from the voters. I am not sure it succeeded, but they did nonetheless make it to parliament for the first time and they are now the third biggest party (although in my opinion this has very little to do with that particular tactic).
This year I am to write about some of the more outrageous political ideas that will be floated about during the current election cycle. Unfortunately, I do admit that I might already be immunised against many of them, and that some of the ideas which seem outrageous to outsiders will simply go unnoticed. Nonetheless, I am pretty sure there will be plenty of examples to prove just how juvenile political discourse in Sweden happens to be.
Anybody who follows debates on life and family will know that Sweden is at the forefront of the efforts against both. Make no mistake however: Sweden is not ground zero in the culture of death. That particularly dubious honour (at least in Europe) would have to go to Belgium which seems to be in a one-horse race towards becoming the most decadent society yet known to man. Many of the ideas floated around casually are nowhere near the horizon in Sweden - and the idea of euthanasia is not one which politicians of any stripe have...
