Leadership and courage do not result from administering a set of rules. Changing the rules will not produce them either. But even a bad set of rules can be made to work if courage and leadership are present. Minority governments work when the leaders of the minority have the courage and the imagination and the leadership to maintain the temporary majorities necessary and sufficient to govern.
Contrary to what is being taken as fact, a new general election in Sweden has not yet been called. While the current Red/Green government has had its budget rejected by the parliament and the current Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, has announced his intention to call a new election, he cannot actually do so until 29th December. The laws require that a new election cannot be called until 3 months after this parliament first met on 29th September. In fact it is perfectly possible – instead – for a no-confidence motion against the government to be called in parliament (10% of members have to call for such a vote) and a simple majority of the vote can shift power from the PM and his government to the speaker of the house. If that happens before 22nd December (Christmas holidays intervening) then Löfven will not be around to call a new election as he intends to do on 29th December. It would then be up to the speaker or any other government which is established to make such a call. In practice Swedish parliaments have never before taken such a bold step and it would take a level of political courage that members of this parliament do not seem to have.
In municipalities all over Sweden a variety of coalitions between the different parties have been formed to create working majorities so that the business of government can continue. It always needs the leader of the largest local party to show some imagination and courage and not a little skill to create these coalitions. Some coalitions sometimes fail on contentious issues which the parties cannot overcome, but then a new coalition emerges so that the business of government continues.
It is this leadership – to first imagine and then to constitute a working majority – which is visible in abundance at local government level which has been absent at the national level. At national level there is now much talk about changing the rules of voting to enable a minority government to govern. This is a red herring. There is much talk also blaming the Sweden Democrat Party of breaking the “Swedish Model”. This, too, is another red herring. The Sweden Democrats may not have followed practice but they certainly broke no rules.
The Prime Minister, the Social Democrats, their Environmental Party partners and their far Left supporters are all screeching about a failure of the rules and the malicious nature of the Sweden Democrats. Even the opposition is calling for a change of rules. But this is not a case of the failure of the rules. It has been a case of a failure of leadership, a failure of the ability to see what is required to govern and ultimately the skill to govern.
Löfven has not had the imagination to visualise a manner of cooperation with the other parties (whether jointly or separately) which would have given a working majority. He has taken the easy path of not crossing the Left/Right divide. He brought the Greens into government and took the support of the far Left. He effectively raised and strengthened the wall between Left and Right. He missed the first rule of building consensus by allying too closely with small and extreme groups, which immediately alienated all others. As soon as he had allied with one party on the left he made no real efforts to balance that with an ally on the right. Starting from a minority position on the left he only achieved another minority but extreme position which only hardened the position of his opponents. He judged that the opposition would be too fractured to defeat his grouping and that was a strategic blunder. He was reduced later to arguing why the opposition should remain fractured and not come together! But even after the blunder led to the defeat in parliament, he had not the vision or the skill to put together a new working majority. Instead he seems to have abdicated his responsibility to look for a solution and announced his intention to dump the problem back on to the electorate.
Though there are a few voices calling for parliamentarians to table a no-confidence motion, I am not expecting any group of 35 members to show the necessary courage. That will lead to another election on March 22nd. But the issue which should be the deciding issue and which should transcend all others should be that of leadership and the courage to govern.
The k2p blog 