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Sweden’s Centre Party nominates Muharrem Demirok as new leader

Muharrem Demirok will take over as leader of Sweden's Centre Party if the party's election committee gets its way, its chairman said on Wednesday.

Published: 11 January 2023 10:38 CET
Sweden's Centre Party nominates Muharrem Demirok as new leader
Muharrem Demirok is expected to be voted in as leader of the Centre Party in February. Photo: Adam Ihse/TT

Demirok, a newly elected member of parliament and former deputy mayor in the city of Linköping, will be formally voted in as party leader at a conference on February 2nd. In theory party members could vote for someone else, but in practice it is always the candidate suggested by the election committee who wins.

He will succeed Annie Lööf, who announced four days after Sweden’s September election that she would be stepping down as leader of the party she has led since 2011.

Lööf grabbed headlines a few years ago when her party – at the cost of supporting the centre-left Social Democrats despite fundamental disagreements on economic issues – broke from its former allies on the right over their support for the far-right Sweden Democrats.

At a press conference announcing her resignation, Lööf said that her decision had been partly influenced by the threats she has faced.

Last summer she was an intended target of a suspected terror attack at Sweden’s Almedalen political festival, with the extreme-right perpetrator instead fatally stabbing a senior Swedish psychiatrist.

With its 24 seats, the Centre Party is a relatively small party in the Swedish parliament, but as a party that sits in – as the name suggests – the centre of Swedish politics, it has often held the role of kingmaker in recent years, although after the 2022 election it ended up on the losing side.

Although there have been no indications that Demirok is considering taking the party down a radically different path in the future, the leadership change “matters because in a sense the Centre Party holds the balance of power”, The Local’s publisher James Savage recently told the Sweden in Focus podcast.

“If the Centre Party were to choose, for example, the centre-right government, then that would give that government a much stronger mandate and much greater flexibility. Conversely if the Social Democrats were to lose the support of the Centre Party then that would make it much, much harder for them to form a government in the immediate or medium term,” he explained.

LISTEN: The Local’s panelists chat about the Centre Party leadership contest in the Sweden in Focus podcast

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POLITICS

Full steam ahead for Swedish economy in new three-part budget bill

Sweden has won the fight against inflation and expects GDP to grow next year, Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson proudly proclaimed as she presented the government's budget bill for 2025.

Published: 19 September 2024 08:33 CEST
Full steam ahead for Swedish economy in new three-part budget bill

“Going forward, the task will be to ensure that high inflation does not return, and at the same time to implement reforms and investments that build a more prosperous, safer and more secure Sweden for generations to come,” said Svantesson in a statement on Thursday morning.

The government predicts that Swedish GDP will grow 2.5 percent next year followed by 3.2 percent 2026.

Unemployment, however, is expected to remain unchanged at 8.3 percent in 2025, only beginning to drop in 2026 (7.9 percent, according to the government’s predictions, followed by 7.6 percent in 2027).

Svantesson told a press conference that a strong focus on economic growth would create jobs.

The 2025 budget, worked out in collaboration between the right-wing government coalition and far-right Sweden Democrats, is far more expansionary than the restrained budget Svantesson presented last year when Sweden was still fighting high inflation: 60 billion kronor towards new reforms rather than 39 billion kronor for 2024. Almost half, 27 billion kronor, will go towards funding lower taxes.

ANALYSIS:

Svantesson highlighted three areas in which new reforms are prioritised:

  • Strengthening household purchasing power after several years of the high cost of living putting a strain on household budgets, with reforms set to push the tax burden to its lowest level since 1980, according to the government.
  • Reinstating the “work first” principle, meaning that people should work rather than live on benefits. Some of the measures include language training for parents born abroad and increasing the number of places in vocational adult education.
  • Increasing growth, focusing on investments in research, infrastructure and electricity supply.

In the debate in parliament on Thursday, the centre-left opposition is expected to criticise the government for lowering taxes for high earners and not investing enough in welfare. 

Investments in healthcare, social care and education are significantly reduced in this budget compared to last year: down from 16 billion kronor to 7.5 billion kronor. 

Meanwhile, the hike of the employment tax credit (jobbskatteavdraget) – a tax reduction given to people who pay tax on their job income – is expected to lead to a 3,671 kronor tax cut for people on the median salary of 462,000 kronor per year.

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