The Swedes have just gone to the polls and we should see some results later this morning. The Centre Right, headed by Fredrik Reinfeldt, was ahead in voter surveys.
From the Times;
Daring to challenge the economic basis for all this is the bald man on the election poster: 41-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt, sports fan, amateur dramatist and career politician whose centre-right “new” Moderate party is challenging the high-tax, big-budget, fully comprehensive welfare state in which nanny not only knows best but also holds the purse strings.
Reinfeldt seized control of his party following its expulsion from a brief period in government 12 years ago, and has dragged it towards the centre ground, aiming for votes of the young and disillusioned. Think David Cameron facing a blend of Jim Callaghan and John Prescott in the avuncular, overly familiar face of Goran Persson, the veteran Social Democrat leader.
Persson, an irascible man given to poking party comrades in the stomach, is charged with mendacious massaging of unemployment figures, officially set at 6% but reckoned by independent outsiders to be 15%.
Reinfeldt’s Moderate party and its three partners in the centre-right Alliance for Sweden say the truth is worse: that up to 2m Swedes, nearly 40% of the workforce, are either working less than they want to or depend on some form of state benefit.
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1 comment:
Challenging those statistics would also benefit many other countries worldwide as people try to reconcile the "big Government but successful" paradox of the Scandanavian countries.
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