The Swedish Green party won 6.9% of the vote (25 seats in a 349 seat parliament) in the last general election. But they are part of the minority government with the Social Democrats (31% of the vote – 113 seats). Inevitably the Social Democrats are forced (or choose to) adopt some of the Green party policies. Most Green party policies are about forbidding things they don’t like on ideological grounds. Or they are about increasing taxes to discourage behaviour they don’t like. Very few of the Swedish Greens’ environmental policies are based on sound science. They are mostly based on alarmism and fear. Even when they propose new taxes they have not even an inkling – apart from how much will be collected – of what they will actually achieve. The goals are never capable of being monitored or – in many cases – even measured.
Whenever the Social Democrats accept Green policies – which they themselves don’t agree with – they put it down to being the “price of having a coalition partner”. They are effectively promoting a minority view and subverting the democratic process. A policy supported by 6.9% of the voters is inflicted upon the entire population.
It happened again this week. Green party minority dogma is planned to be inflicted on the entire country and the Social Democrats – who promised not to do this – are now complicit in the subversion of democracy. It is a simple case of a tiny minority oppressing an overwhelming majority. (Not so different from a dictatorship). The Social Democrats are effectively a “poodle” being wagged by their Green tail.
TheLocal: Sweden’s left-wing government proposed a hike in petrol taxes on Friday, citing the drop in oil prices and pressure put on it by its coalition partner the Greens.
“The oil price has plunged by 50 percent, so it’s become cheaper to fill up at the pump. That’s one thing. The other is that we are in a government with the Green Party,” Social Democratic Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson told reporters at a press conference.
“We need to finance our reforms krona for krona. And that means we need to increase revenues,” she said. The government proposed to increase the tax on petrol by 0.44 kronor ($0.05) per litre and on diesel by 0.48 kronor.
The hike, which would take effect on January 1st, would bring in 4.1 billion kronor ($479 million) to state coffers in 2016.
The Social Democrats no doubt see this as a way of raising revenues while blaming the Greens. But it also demonstrates their incompetence in running a coalition where they ought to be the senior partner. The Green tail is wagging the Social Democratic poodle. Democracies work but they have their share of negatives. And coalition governments where a large party is dependant upon a small party leads to tiny minorities inflicting their views on the majority. There is nothing inherently better in a democracy than in a dictatorship. It all depends on the “goodness” of the democracy or the dictatorship. A “good dictatorship” may well be superior to a “bad democracy”.
In the case of the present coalition government in Sweden, the inescapable conclusion is that the inclusion of the Greens makes it a “bad democracy”.
Tags: Green Party, Sovcial Democrats
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