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POLITICS

Where did the Swedish parties make their biggest EU election wins?

Five of Sweden's eight parliamentary parties made gains in the EU elections last weekend, with the Left Party and the Greens gaining 4.2 and 2.3 percent of the vote respectively. Where did parties gain the most votes?

Published: 11 June 2024 12:00 CEST
Updated: 12 June 2024 15:13 CEST
Where did the Swedish parties make their biggest EU election wins?
The Left Party held their election vigil in Umeå, one of the municipalities where they had their best results in the EU elections. Photo: Mickan Mörk/TT

The Social Democrats

The Social Democrats increased their vote share for the first time ever in an EU election, where they remained the largest party with over a quarter of Swedes voting for them.

“The election results show clear left winds blowing in Sweden,” party leader Magdalena Andersson told the TT newswire. “We’ve gone against the current somewhat compared to other countries, as our main opposition (the Sweden Democrats) lost support.”

The party saw their best results in Överkalix, Arvidsjaur and Älvsbyn, all in northern Sweden, with 44.3, 44.2 and 44.1 percent of the vote. All voting figures in this article are preliminary.

The Moderates

Danderyd outside Stockholm remains the right-wing Moderates’ stronghold, where they received 39.9 percent of votes, followed by Vellinge with 37.8 percent and Lidingö with 34.3 percent.

Unsurprisingly, these were also the worst municipalities for the Social Democrats, who received just 8.5 percent of the vote in Danderyd, 11.7 percent in Vellinge and 12.2 percent in Lidingö.

The Moderates were Sweden’s second largest party in the EU elections, with its leader, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, highlighting the fact that they managed to increase voter share while in government, which is usually considered to be difficult.

“Now we’ve done it twice,” he said.

They reported their worst results in Dorotea, Pajala and Sollefteå (6.1 percent, 6.7 percent and 7.5 percent respectively), all in northern Sweden.

The Greens

The EU elections were good news for the Greens, who increased voter share in almost all municipalities and gained an extra seat. Their best result was in Jokkmokk in the far north of Sweden, where more than one in four voted for them, followed by Lund in southern Sweden (22.6 percent) and Åre in Jämtland (21.9 percent).

They were also the largest party among voters in Stockholm, with 20.5 percent of the vote, just ahead of the Social Democrats.

Top EU candidate Alice Bah Kuhnke described the results as “a success”.

The Greens’ worst results were all in northern Sweden, with just 3.3 percent of the vote in Överkalix, 3.6 in Dorotea and 3.8 in Åsele.

The Sweden Democrats

The EU elections were historically bad for the far-right Sweden Democrats, who lost votes across the country as a whole for the first time since entering parliament in 2010.

They recorded a worse result in almost all of Sweden in the EU election, losing as much as a third of voters in some districts and gaining voter share in just nine. But they’re still one of the strongest in southern region Skåne, and took home one in three votes in Sjöbo municipality.

Their biggest loss in Skåne was in Bromölla, where their voter share dropped 7.9 percentage points to 27.9 percent. In Almgården in Malmö, they lost around a third of their voters, and in Kronetorp-Burlöv in Burlöv, they lost around half of their previous voters.

Hampus Bergh, a Sweden Democrat municipal council member in Gnosjö in Jonköping county, where support for the party dropped 8.5 points to 16.6 percent, said dwindling support could be due to difficulty mobilising core voters.

“I think we’re bad at communicating how important the EU election is to our voters in Gnosjö, and communicating the large impact EU has on municipal, regional and national politics. And getting them to vote,” he told TT. 

The party saw its largest gains in Torsby, Tidaholm and Aneby, gaining 0.4 percentage points in all three municipalities. At the district level, it gained the most votes in Lina östra in Södertälje – 7.5 percentage points.

The Left Party

The biggest winners were the Left Party, who saw their share of the vote increase across the entire country, but especially in the north, making them the only party to gain an extra seat in the European Parliament. Their vote share grew the most in Malå in Västerbotten, where more than a third voted for them (36 percent), followed by a quarter of voters in Umeå and Vilhelmina (both 25.7 percent).

They had their worst results in Moderate strongholds Vellinge (2.4 percent), outside Malmö, and Danderyd (2.6) outside Stockholm, as well as Lomma, also near Malmö, where they got just 3 percent of the vote.

The party’s top candidate, Jonas Sjöstedt, who is also a former leader of the Left Party, described it as “a fantastic election for the red-green parties”.

“If it was a parliamentary election we would have wiped the floor with the Tidö parties,” he told SVT.

The Christian Democrats

The right-wing Christian Democrats saw support drop in almost all municipalities, although the party considered their result to be a win despite this, as they swapped out their MEP Sara Skyttedal with journalist Alice Teodorescu Måwe back in January, just a few months before the election.

They were the only party to lose a seat, with their best results in Högsby in southeastern Sweden (19.6 percent), Sävsjö in Jönköping county (18.4 percent) and Öckerö in the Gothenburg archipelago (18.3 percent).

Their worst results were in Hällefors in central Sweden (2.4 percent), Hofors, just east of Gävle (3.3 percent), and Jokkmokk in the north (3.2 percent).

The Centre Party

In a similar story to that of the Christian Democrats, the Centre Party lost votes in almost all municipalities – gaining voter share in only one: Haparanda on the Finnish border. They managed to hang on to their two seats in the EU parliament, which is a feat considering polls had suggesteed they were at risk of getting less than 4 percent of the vote and missing the threshold entirely.

“When campaigning began people had counted us out. What we’ve shown today is that by working together we’ve had our second-best EU election ever,” party leader Muharrem Demirok, told TT newswire.

Their best result was in Haparanda, with 18.5 percent, followed by Ydre (southeastern Sweden), where they got 15.8 percent and Krokom in Jämtland with 14.3 percent, while their worst results were all in the north: just 2.6 percent in Gällivare and 2.8 percent in both Jokkmokk and Kiruna.

The Liberals

The centre-right Liberals also scraped together just enough votes to clear the four-percent hurdle, with a preliminary result of 4.4 percent. They were popular in Moderate strongholds Danderyd and Lomma, where they got 10.9 and 9.9 percent of the vote, and in Landskrona, where they got 9.8 percent.

Their worst results were in Högsby in the south and Strömsund and Ragunda, both in Jämtland, where they got just 0.7 percent of the vote.

“They’d counted us out,” Liberal leader Johan Pehrson said. “But they were wrong, again.”

That hasn’t stopped him from aiming high for the next EU election. “In 2029 we’re going to get two seats,” he said. 

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Why Sweden’s Chat Control vote is causing parliamentary chaos

Sweden's government last week rushed a controversial EU internet surveillance proposal through a parliamentary committee, opening the way for it to be voted through by the European Council. What's going on?

Published: 24 June 2024 14:08 CEST
Why Sweden's Chat Control vote is causing parliamentary chaos

What happened last week? 

After more than nine months of silence on Chat Control, the informal name given to the EU’s proposed “Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse”, the government last Tuesday rushed a compromise proposal drawn up by the Belgian presidency through the Swedish parliament’s Justice Committee.

The representatives for the Green Party and the Left Party – both of whom are opposed to the measure – then somewhat mysteriously backed the government’s position without leaving a dissenting opinion. 

With only the Centre Party and the far-right Sweden Democrats opposing, Sweden’s government could then claim parliamentary backing for supporting the Belgian compromise at a planned meeting of the EU Council on Thursday. 

“Now our judgement is that an important step has been taken,” Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer told TT in a written statement on Tuesday. “The government is therefore ready to take the next step and allow the EU Council and the Parliament to begin negotiations.” 

Sweden Democrat MP Adam Marttinen pointed out that both the Moderate and Liberal parties had criticised the proposal during the EU election campaign, saying that they would not push forward with the proposal, only to do so days after the election was over. 

“I think that was dishonest with voters,” he told TT. 

The Chat Control proposal was, however, not discussed as expected at the EU meeting meeting on Thursday, raising questions over whether it can be handled by the EU Council during the Belgian presidency. 

What is Chat Control? 

The proposal was put forward by Ylva Johansson, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, in 2022. It aims to combat child pornography by forcing all encrypted messaging services operating in the EU to build in an “upload moderation” system or “backdoor” into their programmes.

This will allow all images and videos to be scanned for child sex abuse material before they are encrypted and sent to the recipient. 

The check would start with images and messages which have already been flagged as child pornography, but it would also look out for new abuse material. 

Users would have to give the messaging service they are using permission to scan their messages, and be stopped from sending videos or images if they do not give it.

The earliest proposal, from 2022, envisaged giving the upload moderation system the power to scan all messages, but the scope of the law has now been limited to image and video files. 

How would it work? 

That is unclear. One option is for the moderation system to be installed on each device used to send messages. Another is for the unencrypted message to first be sent to a cloud server for checking. Both are technologically tricky. 

“No one knows exactly how this would be done. There’s no technical description yet and that’s perhaps what is most frightening, that they are making laws and rules without knowing how they can be safely implemented,” Måns Jonasson, an expert at the Swedish Internet Foundation, told the TT newswire. 

Why is it criticised? 

Critics argue that by removing the possibility of having end-to-end encrypted communication within the EU, at least for ordinary, non-tech-savvy citizens, the law threatens to sharply circumscribe EU residents’ right to privacy. 

“How can this scanning be done in a safe way?” Jonasson asked. “If I take a picture of my children at the beach will I suddenly get flagged up by police for sending abuse material? Would teenagers sending naked pictures to one another also get flagged up? There are a thousand questions that haven’t been answered, and that’s even before you starting talking about whether it’s reasonable that all citizens’ mobile telephones and all images should be under surveillance by the police.”  

A risk, he said, was that once encrypted services had compulsory backdoors in place, authorities and potentially even hackers might use it for other purposes. 

“There are good examples of this. When you build in this kind of back door then it ends up being used by bad actors,” he said. 

And the group of people most likely to find a way to evade the controls, he said, were paedophiles. 

“If you’re a paedophile, you want to hide your activities so if you know that certain apps are being surveilled, then you’re obviously going to use other apps, so the question is why we should do it at all if it’s only those of us who are innocent who are going to be affected.” 

Why did the Green Party and Left Party MPs go against their own party lines? 

That is the mystery. The Green Party initially claimed that Rasmus Ling, the MP on the committee, had simply made a mistake. 

“In hindsight, we should have left a dissenting opinion, but we didn’t. It was a mistake. It is human to sometimes make mistakes,” the Green MP Rebecka Le Moine, who sits on the Swedish parliament’s EU committee, told TT.

“There are two separate versions, the Council’s compromise proposal, which is so general in its text that we cannot back it at all. Then there is a proposal that the Green group in the EU parliament have developed, which we back.” 

But internal messages obtained by the freelance journalist Emanuel Karlsten seemed to show that this was not the case, and that Ling knew exactly which version he was backing, and made a judgement that the compromise solved some of the issues the party had had with the original proposal. 

The Left Party representative, Gudrun Norberg, also claimed to have made an error. 

“It is true that I did not register a dissenting opinion at the committee meeting. That was a mistake and I truly regret it,” she wrote on Facebook. “It did not affect the result of the meeting and the question on Chat Control is far from fully determined. It will come before the [Swedish] parliament’s EU Committee, among other bodies, further on in the decision process.”   

What happens next? 

What last week’s decision does is open the way for Sweden to back the Belgian government’s compromise proposal in the EU Council, which – now that France has opened up to supporting the proposal – means there is no longer a blocking minority of countries in the EU Council of Ministers. 

This will theoretically allow the EU Council to take a collective position on the proposal, meaning negotiations can start with the EU Parliament. 

But, according to Karlsten, last Thursday’s meeting may have been the last chance for Belgium, which currently holds the EU Presidency, to put the measure forward, meaning the responsibility may now pass to Hungary. 

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. 

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