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What are the Swedish government’s key priorities for the year ahead?

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson outlined the government's key priorities as parliament reopened on Tuesday after the summer recess.

What are the Swedish government's key priorities for the year ahead?
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson addressed parliament on September 10th. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/TT

Kristersson noted in his “declaration of government” speech that Sweden is now a member of Nato, that the previously rampant inflation is stabilising at lower levels, and that police are solving more and more gang crimes.

“Month by month, it’s getting harder to be a criminal,” he said, as his government entered the second half of its term, with two years to go until the next election.

“Sweden was long getting poorer and more dangerous. We have started the journey towards becoming richer and safer,” he told the audience of MPs and royal family.

“This is a government that gets things done,” he said.

Kristersson also spoke of his government’s so-called paradigm shift on migration, a key part of the right-wing coalition’s collaboration with the far-right Sweden Democrats.

Some of the proposals include providing incentives for voluntary re-migration, set up reception centres for asylum seekers and make it compulsory for young children in homes where they aren’t learning any Swedish to attend a special language preschool.

He added that asylum migration is at its lowest level.

“When migration decreases, Sweden is given better preconditions to manage integration. How well we as a country succeed in that mission will define what kind of country Sweden is in ten and twenty years,” he said.

As The Local has previously been able to show, highly-qualified migration has fallen in the past year, but Kristersson insisted in his speech that Sweden should be “an attractive country for highly-qualified labour migration, foreign researchers, doctoral students”.

He spoke at length about the government’s attempts to crack down on gang crime, including plans to tighten sentences for youth criminals.

The government expects to earmark 2.3 percent of Sweden’s GDP on military defence, said Kristersson.

Kristersson also brought up one of his Liberal allies’ core issues: decreasing screen time for children.

“We won’t passively accept that children become slaves to the algorithms,” he said, adding that the government will put forward a proposal to completely ban mobile phones in schools and introduce economic subsidies for leisure activities for children.

Kristersson on Tuesday also announced a major reshuffle of his government, promoting Maria Malmer Stenergard to foreign minister and replacing her as migration minister with Johan Forsell, currently minister for foreign trade and international development.

Here’s an English translation of Kristersson’s speech in full.

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POLITICS IN SWEDEN

Why a lottery scandal could change the funding balance in Swedish politics

A Swedish government inquiry this spring stopped short of backing a ban on lotteries to fund political parties. Could a report about unscrupulous selling techniques for the Social Democrats' lottery provide cover for government to push ahead with it anyway?

Why a lottery scandal could change the funding balance in Swedish politics

Last week, the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper reported that Effective Communications, a telesales company based in Barcelona, had been using heavy-handed techniques to sell the Social Democrats’ Kombispel lottery, for which people subscribe monthly for the chance to win prizes every Friday. 

According to six former workers at the agency, they had to cold call elderly people, who were not properly informed about the fact that they were signing up to a subscription rather than a one-off purchase, at the same time as sales people claimed misleadingly that there was a campaign afoot giving them cheaper tickets, or that they could get tickets at a discounted price. 

The revelations are extremely welcome for Sweden’s government and their support party the Sweden Democrats, reopening the way for a full ban at exactly the point when the government is drawing up its proposal for new lottery legislation.

But they are a disaster for the opposition Social Democrats, which risks losing as much as half of its party funding. 

The Social Democrats’ party secretary Tobias Baudin told DN that he was “furious” when he read the accounts of the sales methods used according to the report, and the party has now sacked the board of the Kombispel lottery, and suspended the use of telemarketing agencies to sell its lotteries.  

“In the future we’re not going to need to investigate this sort of call centre company, because this is never going to happen again,” Baudin said. 

“We expect that Kombispel gets to the bottom of this and finds out if this information is correct,” echoed the party’s group leader, Lena Hallengren. “Of course the task given to them has never been to sell lottery tickets whatever the cost.” 

Shutting off the tap

When the government launched its inquiry into tightening the rules around the lotteries run by political parties, its far-right support party, the Sweden Democrats, were unusually honest about what they were trying to do.  

“We need to shut off the money tap which finances Social Democracy, because they have rigged the whole system,” said Tobias Andersson, the Sweden Democrat MP who chairs the parliament’s committee on industry and trade. “Next year, there will be less money on show at the Sossarnas [Social Democrats’] May Day procession.” 

Nothing in the current rules prevents other parties from running lotteries in the same way as the Social Democrats do, but no other party has had such success. The M-lotteriet lottery the Moderate Party launched in 2020 was an embarrassing failure, bringing in just 4.7 million kronor, a fraction of the 153 million pouring in from the Social Democrats’ Kombilotteriet, Femman och Glädjelotten lotteries combined. 

According to the Dagens Industri newspaper, lotteries brought in half of the Social Democrats’ income in 2021, so bringing in a ban would financially cripple Sweden’s biggest opposition party. 

Too far-reaching

Unfortunately for the government, though, the inquiry it launched in 2023 concluded in March that a ban would go too far, calling instead for increased transparency and tighter rules over selling tickets on credit. 

“In the judgement of the inquiry chair a total ban on party political lotteries would be a much too far-reaching measure,” the chair Gunnar Larsson, a former director-general of Sweden’s Consumer Agency, concluded on in the report on March 1st. 

The report was then put out for consultation, with the deadline for submissions on August 12th, since when the government has been drawing up a proposition which is expected to be sent to parliament before the end of the year. 

Even some high-profile Moderate Party figures have criticised the proposal for a ban, with Ulrica Schenström, a former top political aide to former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, denouncing the idea as undemocratic. 

“I usually hold back from making historical comparisons with periods dominated by authoritarian regime or with countries today like Poland, Hungary and Turkey. But what is being proposed brings to mind regimes which deliberately use government power to weaken and ultimately destroy their political opponents,” she wrote on Facebook last year.

Sven Otto Littorin, a former employment minister, also said that the attempt to use government power to weaken a political opponent was worrying. 

“It is easy to be blinded by the working methods and lack of morals of Kombilotto,” he wrote on Facebook. ” And some think it’s fun to slap S [the Social Democrats] in the face. But it is undeniably a real warning bell when government power is used for such purposes. That’s something one should really be above doing.” 

Ban back on the table 

The story in Dagens Nyheter could not have come at a more convenient time for the government. At exactly the point when it has to decide on whether to overrule the inquiry and push for a ban anyway, a story has broken that gives them justification for doing so.

On the same day that the story was published, Niklas Wykman, the financial markets minister who is responsible for the new law, confirmed that the revelations could reopen moves towards a ban. 

“This once again brings back the question of whether there should be a ban,” he told TT. “The main approach on our side has been that there should be clearer regulations. That was also the approach of the inquiry chair. But this puts the question of a ban back on the table.” 

The Social Democrats have not yet given up the fight, though, with Hallengren reiterating on Thursday that a ban on party lotteries would represent “a threat to democracy”.  

The coming months will show whether the government is ready to ignore accusations that it is using undemocratic measures and take a measure that, while it will doubtless save some people from gambling debt and unscrupulous salespeople, will also throttle the funding of their political opponents. 

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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