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UPDATE: Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven to resign

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven announced on Sunday that he will step down as party leader this autumn, a year ahead of Sweden’s next election.

Published: 22 August 2021 12:19 CEST
Updated: 22 August 2021 14:44 CEST
UPDATE: Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven to resign
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven giving a speech on August 22nd. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT

Former trade union chief Löfven took the reins of the Social Democrats in 2012 and led his party to two successful elections in 2014 and 2018. But a new leader will take over ahead of the 2022 election, Löfven said in a speech on Sunday.

He will step down at the party’s congress in November.

Löfven, 64, came into politics after heading up one of Sweden’s most powerful trade unions, IF Metall, following a career as a welder.

He is known for his negotiation skills, and he’s had ample opportunity to flex them during his tenure, but the party has been struggling in the polls.

Just months after taking power, his party failed to push its budget through, and Löfven called a snap election, but this was cancelled after crisis talks. In the next election in 2018, his party got its worst result in over a century, and it took four months of negotiations before a new government was put together.

Earlier this summer, he became Sweden’s first prime minister in history to lose a no-confidence vote, following a row over rent controls. However, the opposition was unable to form a viable coalition to take over, and so Löfven returned to the helm again, only two weeks later.

Löfven announced his resignation at his annual summer speech, this year held in Åkersberga near Stockholm.

“The decision has matured over time. I have been party chairman for ten years, prime minister for seven. These years have been amazing. But everything comes to an end. I want to give my successor the best of conditions,” he said.

Löfven has led a weak minority government together with the Greens Party for the past three years, struggling to find a workable coalition following the inconclusive elections of September 2018.

The announcement of his resignation came nonetheless as a surprise, as Löfven had previously indicated he wanted to lead the party in the next election campaign.

But Ewa Stenberg, political commentator at Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, said it was a wise decision on his part.

“Lofven’s not a good election campaigner or debater, he’s not the leader the Social Democrats need in a tough election campaign where rhetoric is important,” she wrote.

“Against that background, it’s logical that he hands over to someone who’s better with words and who can spark enthusiasm.”

Woman as next PM?
It is not yet known who will succeed Löfven as party leader, though Stenberg and other political commentators speculated that Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson was a hot tip.

Andersson has held the finance portfolio for seven years, and has on occasion stood in for the prime minister.

Health Minister Lena Hallengren, who like Andersson enjoys relatively high ratings among the public, especially for her handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, was also mentioned as a possible successor.

Despite being a longstanding champion of women’s rights and gender equality, Sweden, unlike its Nordic neighbours, has yet to have a woman prime minister.

Whoever is elected to succeed Löfven as party leader would have to be approved by parliament in order to take over as prime minister.

Since coming to power in 2014, Löfven has weathered the decline of social democracy in Europe, the rise of the far right and even the pandemic.

Member comments

  1. You can’t first say “Löfven […] led his party to two successful elections in 2014 and 2018” and then a few lines further down in the same article write “[…] in 2018, his party got its worst result in over a century, and it took four months of negotiations before a new government was put together.” The 2018 election was hardly “successful” but instead was a downright godawful disaster for both Löfven and his social-democrat party, and indeed for Sweden as a whole.

    The only thing Löfven has done in the last seven years is to sell Sweden down the river to the extremist 4-percent Miljöpartiet, and would not be in power at all if it wasn’t for the Centre and Liberal parties’ betrayal of their own electorate.

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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?

Published: 16 September 2024 14:32 CEST
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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