Swedish elections28 Jun 2018 00:24
Mr Damberg, may not be the man after the elections. Perhaps our Swedish posters would like to comment.
With elections due on Sept. 9, polls show a slump in support for the governing Social Democrats, in power since 2014, though an alliance of four other parties may be able to form a minority government.
But with immigration and healthcare topping surveys as the biggest issues facing the country, a party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats, has surged and may hamper any efforts to form a functioning government. In some polls, the Sweden Democrats have even overtaken the Social Democrats as the country’s biggest party, with backing from more than 25 percent of voters.
Sweden’s nationalists are cementing their support at near 20 percent as the country heads for an election in September that is all but certain to end in gridlock.
The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) were backed by 18.5 percent of potential voters, up 5.6 percentage points from the election in 2014, a closely watched biannual poll from the country’s statistics office showed on Tuesday.
The biggest loser was the ruling Social Democrats, who fell 2.7 percentage points to 28.3 percent. That would be the worst result since Sweden’s first fully democratic election in 1921, and a big blow for a party that for decades won more than 40 percent of the vote
For info.....Michael Damberg is a social democrat.
Extracts from Bloomberg.