With the Swedish general elections just around the corner, the circus is starting to liven up. Billboards adorn the grass verges, shopping centre tv screens have been highjacked, and you can't move through the centre of town without running in to a campaign hut.
Personally I think that Sweden has far too many polical parties. Several are no longer relevant today while others have since been superceeded by other parties. I don't think there should be just two parties, a left and a right. That doesn't give enough scope. But 10 well known parties and an equal number of obscure parties is probably about 15 too many. In my opinion.
Sweden has, in effect, a mixed member proportional representation system, which means that a party can gain membership to paliament through direct voting or through gaining a certain percentage of the overall vote. In theory it is a good system as it allows for for representation by a party who, for example, placed second in every electoral seat. NZ had a problem for years with the ruling party not having the majority of votes. MMP was introduced as a fairer means of distributing the vote of the people.
That's the theory of MMP. The reality isn't quite the same utopia. In reality the parliamentary system gets flooded by crackpot parties who somehow managed to get enough votes to send one or 2 unknown members into parliament. They achieve little and merely serve to hold up the process of government. Their main problem is that don't represent anyone specific, as no one specifically has voted them in.
The Swedish system suffers from the same inherent flaw. Idiotic parties who, by dumb luck, managed to convince enough equally dumb people into voting for them so that they can send a couple of people off to parliament with the dillusional notion that everyone else wants them there. It doesn't need too much explaining to say that Sweden Democrats are the dumbest of the dumb. The only smart thing they have done is to pick a party name which is so suspiciously close to one of the proper political parties that they might score a few votes by mistake.
Sweden Democrats have really one one drum to bang, and that's to play on the fear of over immigration. Now, as dumb as they are, they have identified a serious problem that has ramped up since the formation of the EU. The unrestricted freedom of movement has meant that people are continually moving away from countries with a lower standard of living and towards those countries with higher standards of living. Coupled with the extremely generous quota of asylum seeking immigrants which Sweden takes on board every year and, yes, immigration is a problem which does need to be addressed. In that respect I agree with Sweden Democrats. Unfortunately, that's where both respect and agreement ends. Immigration needs to be fixed, it just doesn't need to be fixed using SD methods. Extreme right tactics have no place in a modern society, and certainly not in Sweden. The irony is that even those within their own party know that what they are proposing is wrong. During previous local body elections, SD bizarrely scored enough votes to sit on a few local councils. That created a problem as someone was going to have to sit in that council seat and publically represent the SD obscene views. Turns out that some people were happy enough to vote for SD when they could be anonymous but, when it came actually fronting up and proclaiming their allegiance, they were all suddenly a bit shy. Around the country there are empty seats on local councils because no one wants anyone else to know that they support SD. If you believe they are right, then why the problem with representing them ? I think those people know the answer, they just don't want to admit it.
The Swedish parliament and, more recetly, the European parliament have found a reaonable way to deal with these parasites. They have flat out refused to work with them. It got so bad that, in the case of the European parliament, the extreme right parties had to form their own club as no one elese would let them into theirs. Undemocratic ? Probably. But chalk up a victory for the concept of basic and moral humanity. Some times you just have to do the right thing and I applaud the other parties for taking a united stand. Maybe there is hope after all.
A couple of days back I was walking from my work to the bus stop at the end of the day. Passing through the centre of town I walked past the groups of candidates who had been standing there all day, answering questions from the public. All except for one party, that is. As I was heading through, up rolled 20 police officers (I counted them). Behind them came a lone scrawny figure who looked like he had been dressed in a clown costume hire store. The SD candidate had thought himself so popular that he had felt the need to phone ahead and order 20 police officers in order to protect him from "well wishers". As I watched this ridiculous tax payer funded circus, I wondered if the picture being painted really needed any words. Only one party needs police to protect themselves from the very community from which they are trying to court votes. Only one. As I said, I think that said it all.
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