General elections show bankruptcy of reformist parties THE ONLY ruling Social Democratic Party in northern Europe, Sweden's SAP faced the polls on September 15. This was the first occasion in some time in the heartland of the European Social Democracy that a reformist government has had to go to the voters with a record of austerity policies and cutbacks. Moreover, Sweden has been one of the main models, if not the main one, for "welfare" capitalism, or the so-called Social Democratic third way. So, these elections attracted international attention in particular as a test of how well the most "socially reponsible" of capitalisms was weathering the harsh winds of the world economic crisis. Gerry Foley discussed the results with Tom Gustafsson, a leader of the Socialist Party, Swedish section of the Fourth International (SP-IV).
Despite a continuing decline in the standard of living of the great majority of Swedish people under 'the rule of Olof Palme, who resumed power after the 1982 elections, the SAP managed to win a narrow victory on September 15. However, the Social Democrats lost seven seats, being left with 159 in a 349. seat parliament. They are able to form a majority only with the support of the Communist Party (Vpk), which itself lost one seat, retaining 19. The SAP-Vpk majority thus held 178 seats to 171 for the three bourgeois parties.
The only national campaign to the left of the established parties was launched by the Socialist Party, Swedish section of the Fourth International (SP-IV). It quadrupled its vote from the last parliamentary elections, gained its first city council seat, getting 1% of the vote or over in a number of key industrial centers.
Within the bourgeois bloc itself, a notable shift took place. The big losers were the Conservatives, or Moderata, the largest of the parties on the right. They lost their overall majority in the bourgeois bloc, dropping from 86 to 76 seats. The Center Party suffered a setback, going from 56 to 44 seats. At the same time, the Liberals (Folkpartiet) increased their representation in the parliament, or Riksdag, from 21 to 51 seats.
The fact that they had barely managed to hang on to the government did not keep the Social Democrats from celebrating a great victory for themselves and for the 'welfare state.'
"One more victory like this and they will be lost," Tom Gustafsson from the national leadership of the SP-IV and author of a book on the Swedish Social Democracy (1) told me. "They waged a campaign under the slogan 'Sweden on the right course, defending their three-year record in government. But many people have direct bitter experience of what this period meant, especially low-wage earners and people in the social services sector. For them, the claim that Sweden was on the right course was hard to take."
So, why were the SAP losses only relative, I asked. Gustafsson explained:
"Sweden still has relatively little open unemployment. The growing unemployment has been covered up by all sorts of partial jobs programs." The official unemployment rate is 3%, but it rises to 6% or 1% ll you count the number in 'retraining' or other schemes. "So, there was not a complete crisis of Social Democratic credibility yet. Moreover, at the end of the campaign, the SAP was able to refurbish their reformist image by strong attacks on the Conservatives, who they accused of wanting to wipe out the welfare system altogether.
"Moreover, it has to be remembered that this election came after three years of economic boom in which Sweden has profited consider-
"Igaar, idag. i morgon, Svensk socialdemokrati i tre akter," ("Yesterday. Today, Tomorrow, Swedish Social Democracy in Three Acts," Stockholm, Roede Rummet, 1984. International Viewpoint 28 October 1985
ablv from an increase in exports ably trom an increase in exports to the US, in particular. In the coming years, on the other hand, we face the prospect of depression. And Sweden will have to face the new downturn in worse circumstances than at any time since the Second World War.
"That is, we already have high unemployment figures by Swedish standards. The Social Democrats are going to go ahead and cut back social services and public spending in general more and more. They have made that clear. They have not explained exactly how they will do it. But it is very clear that they are going to take away the social gains the working people have made in the past decades.
"So, the sort of campaign the Social Democrats waged in this election could boomerang, if people remember what they said. The credibility gap will grow, especially for wage earners with low incomes and the unemployed.
"The difference between the SAP vote at the local and national level points to the widening of this credibility gap. In the parliamentary election, their absolute vote was down by 50,000. But in the local elections, they lost a lot more, and it is evident that their greatest losses were in industrial areas, working-class neighborhoods, immigrant neighborhoods.
"At the same time, the Social Democrats gained a certain popularity with a marginal layer of the upper middle classes, who might otherwise have voted for the bourgeois parties.
"Another indicator is the abstention rate. Of course, the turnout for the elections in Sweden is traditionally very high, more than 90%, and it remained high at this point. But there was a decline of 1.5% overall, and it was much more in the working-ciass and immigrant neighborhoods." Social democracy's little brother
What about the Communist Party, I wondered. In Sweden, as in other countries, the CP's strategy is to оссиру the old reformist ground left vacant as the Social Democracy moves to the right. The very respectable Eurocommunist Vpk should have been in a good position to attract Social Democratic voters critical of the Palme government's policies. In fact, the pre-election polls had pointed to that. Why did that not happen?
"The Vpk in fact had an opening for increasing its vote, if it had waged a sharp campaign against the right, against the bourgeois parties, against austerity, against the cutbacks, for
International Viewpoint 28 October 1985
SLUTDISKAT!
6-timmarsdag
Lika lön
Bra dogis at alla barn
Valj
ARDETAR ROTEST WILD
Socialistiska partiet *A six-hour day, equal pay and quality day-care centers for all children' (DR) preserving and developing the social services, and then combined that with concrete criticism of the government's policy over the last three years — the increase in unemployment and the decline in real wages, especially at the start of the government's term, when it devalued the currency by 16%. They could have gained if they had criticized the social backs, the government's ungenerous policies toward immigrants and political refugees, or its very weak, and sometimes even scandalously inadequate environmental program. But they did not do that.
"The Vpk's main gambit is to present itself as a left pressure on the government. Well, in the most recent period, its pressuring role has been very relative. It has supported austerity packages after getting only minor modifications. In line with this, it has had to give up some of its key demands, such as the demand for an end to indirect taxes on food and necessities.
"Thus, the net result for the Vpk was a decline of 0.3% in votes, in a situation where they should have gained and seemed in fact to be gaining."
So, what sort of future do the Swedish Eurocommunists have to look forward to now?
"The center of gravity in the Vpk is shifting more and more to its parliamentary group. The fact that they now hold a decisive balance of power in reality puts them in a tighter spot. The SAP government rests on them. If they do not vote for its proposals, the bourgeois parties will get the majority. This is a fantastic situation for a Social Democratic government to blackmail the Communists. If they don't go along, they will be isolated and exposed to the traditional Social Democratic attacks for being "agitators" "Stalinists." The Vpk leadership will think long and hard before letting itself be put in such a situation."
Not very long ago, the Vpk leaders in a town in southern Sweden joined the SP-IV. Could more opposition currents develop in this situation?
"There has been and will continue to be a certain opposition in the Vpk to compromises with the government. We expect that these tensions will increase in the next period, not immediately, but as the direction of the party's policies becomes clearer."
Among the bourgeois parties, the Liberals, who have a social liberal tradition, put their siblings in the shade. Could that mean that the "wets" are on the rise in Sweden too, that bourgeois political forces themselves are getting cold feet about launching a hard-fisted attack on the workers' gains?
"I think that there were two main reasons for the Liberals' success. One was the kind of campaign the Conservatives waged. It was a very aggressive one, partially modeled on those of the bourgeois parties in the United States. It reflected the first flight of the young guard of the Conservatives, grouped around Ulf Adelsohn. They are called the "broiler' or 'fledgling' class of Conservative politicians. That is, to mix a metaphor, they are over-eager young rightists who aren't yet dry behind the ears. They are on fire to preach the rightist gospel, but have no experience of practical politics.
"So, the Broilers waged a campaign that went politically further than part of their electorate could stomach. They demanded far-reaching cuts in childcare, in transportation facilities for old people, cuts in the hospitals, in unemployment benefits, etc. They made that an important part of their campaign, combined with that of a tax reform that very clearly meant a reversed Robin-Hood policy -take from the poor and give to the rich. This line was set rather early in the campaign.
"On top of that, the Broilers tried to introduce a very un-Swedish showbusiness style. For example, at one point, a Conservative leader had the idea of taking a bath in the water reservoir of one of the nuclear power plants. That was an affront even for bourgeois people. The same politician made very extreme statements on immigration policy, demanding that the government begin to operate already on the East German side of the border to stop the influx of Iranian, Iraqi, and Turkish refugees.
"This sort of thing did not go over at all well with the traditional base of the Conservatives, which,
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as in the case of its counterpart in Norway, is the respectable middle class, well-off white-collar workers, members of the liberal professions, teachers, professors. They were not amused.
"You see, the campaign reflected really reactionary currents among the youth who have been attracted to the Conservatives, but who are out of line with the attitudes of their traditional base. So, by the end of the campaign, the Liberals were able to pick up a section of the Conservatives repelled by this strident new rightism.
"Moreover, the Liberals claimed to defend both the market economy and social reponsibility. At the same time as saying that they defended the essential pillars of the welfare society, they declared that cuts were necessary. In fact, if you look at their actual policies in the national and local parliaments, they go as far as the Conservatives, but they have a different image.
"In addition, the leader of the Liberal Party, Bengt Westerberg is new and young (42 years old) and is not associated with any seandals or any unattractive personal features. So, he was able to help the Liberal image." Greens, right and left
Of course, it was not just the Conservatives who lost to the Liberals. The Center Party of Torbjoern Faelldin, who presided over two bourgeois governments between 19761982, also took a shearing.
"The center party won a lot of votes in the early and mid-1970s because it was seen as kind of a Green party, a bourgeois Green party, because of its apparent opposition to nuclear power. It has lost a lot of that image since because of its practical policies."
In these elections an oppositionist Green Party got significant votes in a number of places. But this was only one aspect of the growth of discontent with the established parties and a search for alternatives.
"We can see the beginning of a political vacuum developing to the left of the established parties. There is now a certain layer of trade unionists, youth, etc. who cannot stomach the policies of the government, are starting to pose questions, and some of them are starting to look around for alternatives. We expect this process to develop in the future and tensions to grow between the leaderships and base of the parliamentary workers parties.
"There are also people who do not think of themselves simply as standing to the left of the established parties. There is a feeling, especially among youth, of opposition to all established political parties. They don't place themselves, necessarily on a scale from right to left, but they are open to alternatives.
"This discontent was expressed in these elections in a protest vote that took different forms. It's an important phenomenon that there are now 52 municipalities in Sweden where local parties, either Green parties, linked to the National Green Party, or other local parties, hold the balance of power. That is, there are 52 municipalities in which neither the bourgeois parties nor the parliamentary workers parties hold the majority.
"It's true that in the last elections the Greens got 1.9% and this time they got 1.5%, a decrease on the national scale. But in national elections there is a kind of blackmail, since you have to get over 4% to get representation in parliament. That creates a very strong pressure for voting for the established parties. Obviously, this pressure is less on the local level, and there the Greens were able to channel significant discontent."
In a situation of growing dissatisfaction with the parliamentary workers parties, it is proving possible, even in a country as exceptionally well off and politically stable as Sweden for revolutionists to gain a hearing among small but important sections of the working class. That is, this is possible when revolutionists can link up their perspectives to the concerns of those sections of the masses becoming exasperated with the system.
Sweden, the only national alternative to the left of the parliamentary workers parties was offered by the SP-IV campaign. "All the other so-called left groups, the [right-wing] Maoists in the SKP and the [ultraleft ] Maoists in the KPmlr, and the 100% pro-Moscow split from the Vpk, the APK (Workers Communist Party) decided not to run. The APK withdrew in the last period before the elections. So, we offered the only national political alternative to the established parties."
It is particularly difficult to challenge the established parties in national elections in Sweden because of the very strong centralism in the country, which has deep historical roots. A good deal of what from the outside looks like democracy is actually well-oiled authoritarianism. Sweden did not have a bourgeois revolution but modernized in a way not so different from Prussia.
"There was a complete news blackout on our campaign in the national mass media. We did not get one second on national television, not one second on national radio, not one second on the Stockholm local radio, not one millimeter in the big bourgeois and Social Democratic papers.
"In these conditions we were very satisfied with the vote we got. It was better than we dared hope. We got 16,200 votes in the elections for the Riksdag, and a few thousand more than that if you add the local elections. We got one seat on the city council in Koping, an industrial town to the west of Stockholm, and we were close to getting seats in several important industrial towns, including Kiruna in the far north, Borlaenge, Umeaa, and in Nacka, just outside Stockholm.
"In a number of places, we got quite significant votes. In Koping, we got 2% of the vote. In Orebro, we got 1,5%, in Goteborg [the country's second city and major industrial center] and the city of Stockholm, we got around 1%. The pattern of our vote is very clear. We got almost nothing in upper-class areas, little in the central parts of the big towns. Our vote was concentrated in working-class and immigrant areas, where in many cities, we got 4%, 5% and even 6%.
"It was also notable that in working class areas we do not seem to have suffered from the tactical-vote syndrome, that is people with radical views voting for the Vpk, for example, to 'make their votes count. On the other hand, this was a problem in student areas. This is indicated by the fact that in working-class areas, the difference between our national and local vote was less. In general, those workers who voted for us tended to vote for us on all levels."
What exactly did people vote for when they marked their ballots for the SP-IV? 'No more gifts to the rich' (DR)
NOG MED GÄVOR
ÂT DE RIKA!
Valj = PROTEST ARDETAR
Socialistiska partiet International Viewpoint 28 October 1985
"We have gained a political profile built on consistent opposition to austerity policies, the reversed Robin Hood policies of the government, on defense of the disadvantaged groups - immigrants, political refugees, and youth fighting for jobs and a place to live. It is also built on international solidarity with Poland, Central America, and now South Africa. In the latter case, we have played an important role in supporting Metalworkers Against Apartheid, which was a campaign focused on the metalworkers congress in early September, just before the elections.
"Metalworkers Against Apartheid was a broad campaign for Swedish disinvestment in South Africa. It came out of a call launched by workers in factories that have investments in South Africa and for trade unions holding shares in companies in South Africa selling their stocks as a gesture of support for the resistance in South Africa.
"Some two thousand metalworkers contributed to a big advertisement that was published in the big Social Democratic paper on the day of the South Africa debate at the metalworkers congress. The supporters of disinvestment did not win at the congress. But this campaign laid the groundwork for building an important current of public opinion.
"We built our campaign under the slogan of Workers and Youth Protest in the Elections of 1985. We tried to set an example of unity against bourgeois policies. We appealed to other organizations to join with us, socialist youth organizations, immigrant organizations. The independent youth organization 'Benny' participated, as did a couple of immigrant organizations. We also tried to make the campaign attractive to unorganized socialists, who were invited to participate as independents. So, this was a first test of a broad campaign. And in some local areas where systematic work was done to unorganized people, there were good results.
"We tried to give an example of a non-sectarian electoral campaign, in which our party was the backbone but open to all sorts of collaboration with other forces that agreed on the need to offer this sort of alternative. Since the SP-IV was the only registered party involved, the votes were cast on its line. But we did not want to run simply an SP-IV campaign."
The campaign was a major step forward for the SP-IV's perspective of offering a consistent working-class alternative to the policies of the bureaucratized workers parties and for the SP-IV itself.
"I don't think that the tactical vote argument will work against us
International Viewpoint 28 October 1985 in the same way in the future. We will also be able to put more pressure on the left parties that did not run. The debate with them will continue. Our situation has changed now. None of us in the organization has experienced a situation in which there are such important openings. The decisive factor in what we achieve in the coming period lies with ourselves.
"We have to be able to do two things. We have to appear as a current promoting unity, building united actions around the key political issues. And we have to appear as both a spark and the relay, because we are in a different situation here than, for example, revolutionists in Denmark, where there are a whole range of parties to the left of Social Democracy. We are in a much more relatively isolated position. We have a resonance but the party itself is in a different position. We can't relate in the same way to other parties as Danish revolutionists. We will try to relate to the Vpk and the Social Democrats. But we will have to be the backbone in most of the unity actions we can build. That doesn't mean sectarianism, but we have to understand the importance of the role our organization has to play." Building the party
After the elections, the SP-IV National Committee decided to take a number of measures to strengthen the party organization and adjust it to the new openings.
"We decided to create a structure for supporters, that is, people who declare their loyalty to the party and are prepared to pay an annual sustainer. They will be invited to our major activities. But they are people who are not able to play the sort of active role that regular members of a revolutionary party have to play.
"We adopted the goal of recruiting 500 organized supporters before our next congress half a year from now. We also adopted a plan to stabilize the subscriptions to our paper, Internationalen. We have 2,600, and we will build on that.
"With the contacts we have made, we expect to be able to build branches in ten more cities. We are planning to go into neighborhoods where we got a high vote with paper sales, leaflets, and local initiatives. And in Stockholm, for example, we are aiming to strengthen our public presence through our bookstore and by holding open houses where people can come and meet representatives of the party.
DE STJÄL DIN
FRAMTID!
ARBETE
BOSTAD
EN LÒN ATT
LEVA PA
ESTpartiet "A job, a place to live and a living wage'
"In a more general way, we are aiming at a change in style, in tone, at adopting ways of discussion that are more open, using the paper and other publications from that. That is, we have to adjust our so-called internal discussions to take account of the thousands of people who look to our party but are not members, in order to be able to integrate them in the discussions. All of these measures are summed up in a recruitment campaign under the slogan 'Our party is your party, join now!'"
In this effort, Gustafsson said, the SP-IV intends to pay special attention to youth and women.
"Now, it's a good thing to have older people in the organization because it shows that we are not an ephemeral organization. In the factories in particular, it is important to have people who are forty, 45, fifty or more, who have experience and credibility as people who know what it's all about and are not lightminded. But when the average age is going up as it is in the party now, it means that the number of young or very young comrades is decreasing. So, we have to take deliberate measures. In particular we have to build major campaigns to defend the interests of women. We are now involved in local campaigns against job discrimination. One, for example, is in the north against the mining company LAB, which has discriminatory hiring policies. Another is against the Sandvik steel company in mid-Sweden which also has discriminatory policies. The general campaign for reducing the workweek has special importance for women, in conjunction with campaigns against forced part-time work for women, for real jobs for women, against the attempts to force women back into the home, against cuts in childcare, and so forth."
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SOUTH AFRICA