Sweden’s opposition prepares power shift

Bloomberg

Swedish right-wing opposition parties are stepping up negotiations on forming a new government, after Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson tendered her resignation on Thursday.
The Social Democrat leader has conceded defeat in Sunday’s election, and Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson will now try to forge an agreement with three parties that backed his candidacy. They include the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, who are now the country’s second-largest political force.
The main obstacle facing Kristersson as he seeks to take over Andersson’s job is to forge a common platform and square differences between the Sweden Democrats —who mainly vowed to clamp down on a gang-fueled crime wave — and the much smaller Liberals, which may seek to minimize the nationalists’ influence.
It took more than four months to form the government after the previous election, in 2018. This time, the process is expected to be more expedient, partly because it comes at a time when the country is facing a raft of challenges and is preparing to take over the European Union’s rotating six-month presidency.
“All these parties can probably agree on most of the main issues facing the country now – the energy crisis, the bid to join Nato, more funding to the military, crime,” said Fredrik Erixon, director of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy. “But policies on immigration will be far more difficult as the Sweden Democrats would like to see far more restrictions than the other parties want, and their policy on immigrant repatriation is completely off charts for Kristersson and his centrist colleagues.”
The shift in power in the biggest Nordic country is taking place against a backdrop of fears of a hard landing, soaring inflation rates and concerns over adequate power supplies as the northern hemisphere heads into heating season and supplies of energy from Russia have been severely curtailed. A likely recession portends difficult talks over tax cuts and reduced social benefits, where the nationalists align more closely with the Social Democrats than their Moderate partners, Erixon said.