DS

When Social Democratic prime minister Olof Palme returned to power in 1982, he faced difficult circumstances both in Sweden and internationally. There was the election of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the 1979 oil crisis, budget deficits, and slow growth in the Swedish economy. The Keynesian social-democratic model was struggling. The party decided it couldn’t expand the public sector further and set off looking for different policies. In this period, a small group of politicians and officials with clearly neoliberal ideas gained influence within the party, seeking to save the welfare state through cuts and lower taxes. And they got their way.

Shortly thereafter, in the early 1990s, we had a huge economic crisis as a result of the deregulation of the domestic financial sector. When the Social Democrats returned to power in 1994, promising to save the welfare state, their solution was cutbacks. Since then, we’ve had permanent, slow austerity. The Social Democrats who are around today have never carried out any substantial reform agenda. Instead, they have learned that “being responsible” equals belt-tightening for the Swedish economy.

In the process, the Swedish Social Democrats embarked on the same journey as the Democratic Party in the United States and Labour in the UK — cutting ties with the working class, disciplining union power, and pushing intellectuals away from them. In 1990, they got rid of the policy that automatically made you a party member when you joined a social-democratic union. Before that, union members had formed an absolute majority within the party, but now the party is practically owned by its officials.

Industrial groups have also bought their way into the party. This began in the 1980s when there was a political fight over employee ownership funds (which never became reality). Trade groups began serious operations to influence the party’s internal policymaking, setting up networks for “business-friendly” Social Democrats and paying for parliamentary inquiries about health care. The steel and nuclear power industries began intense lobbying efforts. As part of the campaign to join the European Monetary Union (EMU), corporate groups hired hundreds of Social Democrats. They lost the referendum on joining the EMU. But now they work at the Government Offices.

In short, I have sympathy for the party’s decision to deregulate a few rigid state monopolies back in 1985, and understand that some cutbacks were necessary to save our economy in the mid-1990s. But today, that policy has been kept on life support for way too long. The problems facing us are different, and the party has no idea how to react to that. That’s what we’re trying to create through Reformisterna. We want to do what was done in 1932 — to bring forth a new economic policy and a new welfare policy to lay the foundation for a social-democratic renaissance.