Liberation day 9/17

Me and Arvid are closely watching and rejoicing at the ongoing ballot counts. Exit counts show 49.7% to the right-wing alliance versus 45.6% to the sitting social democrats and allies.

I had loose plans to write down a few political comments which have surfaced the last couple of days here, in the meantime I'll settle for two illustrative pictures:

Fig 1: Chairman Persson

Fig 2: The Freedom Fighters

... and a confused quote:

Arvid: "I think... people should have less opinions... things would be more fair then."
K-O: "Can I quote you on that?"
Arvid: "Sure... we live in a free country, regrettably."

And another one, regarding that alliance voters would prefer to be without the Christian Democrats:

Arvid: "You can't just ditch someone from the team, just because they limp and... don't play ball. Though the fat guy one can always place in the goal."

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Ok, so here comes a few comments on swedish politics, as supplied by yours truly.

1. If exposed, low-salary workers in particular in the public sector and within the care sector traditionally vote emotionally with the social democrats, since they are the ones always promising to expand the public sector...

... it is then curious to note that the social democrats in the sitting regime (somewhere you have to draw the line between a government and regime, they crossed it sometime in the eighties) are the ones solely responsible for the salary levels in the public sector. If government would allocate more money to public care, chances are those money would be used to employ more people, rather than raise salaries. Regardless of how how much money is allocated to the public care system, the social democrats are the ones forcefully defending a situation of only one employer, little competition for improvement, no measurements of quality and nowhere to go for discontented employees. It is my impression that the social democrats cement low salaries and poor conditions in the public sector, that is what matter more than how much money is actually poured into it and thus they are quite contrary to their image the worst enemy of those people.

Now it seems the race is not quite over yet, let's cross fingers and hope we won't have to wait for the final result until wednesday. Again as Arvid said: "It's a well-known fact guys can't spend more than 24 hours in the same room without inevitably wanting sex"

2. I would be interested to see, if there exist a checklist for "great ways to argue yourself out of tight situation". If so, I'm sure at the bottom of that list would be "skew facts" on par with "redefine concepts". Should you have to resort to either of those, it probably mean to the very least that you're in deep shit.

You're definitely in deep shit if you:

• have to redefine what torture is (US politics, but anyway...)
  
• argue your government's achievements with data statisticians say is "inconclusive or negative" by referring to the "gini-coefficient"
  
• claim that in "your own" polls you achieve 15-30% of the votes when everything else point toward 1%
  
• think statistical errors will bring you from devastating loss to anything successful
  

Oh yeah, oh yeah, OH YEAH! The nail is officially in the coffin, Persson has announced he both resign his government, and from leading the social democrats.

3. An Alliance government no doubt will have both a period of adjustment (after all, it was a while since they posessed executive power), great challenges and probably scandals as well. Nevertheless, they have a huge account of abuse capital before any reasonable person should want to drop the pants for the social democrats again. It will be very very interesting to see what will happen with Sweden the next couple of years, if the agenda and rhetorics might shift, but interesting to notice is that this time around the left-cartel lost power in a period of reasonable economic strength. In earlier years swedish economic analysis has always been subject to extremely dense revisionism.

For the record, I made a bet with Arvid that the Pirate Party would get more than 2%. There seem to be little room for me to win that now. Also for the record, Arvid made very essential observations that Persson seem to have attracted electionloss-hemmorhoids and "I hope Anitra get's a divorce now!". Also, Maud Olofsson is definitely one hot mama.

4. To speculate some in the history of Sweden, bias and the so-called "right-wing ghost", an Alliance victory mean more than a Left-cartel victory would, since in Sweden so many of the passive voters side with the left. This mean a 50/50 result would actually imply the Alliance have a slightly stronger and more approved policy than the left, and this victory... it truly feels like a victory.

Logically, few politically conservative, ignorant or idealistic would ever vote to the right. They vote for the left, the social democratic or the environmentalists (you deduce yourselves what this imply about the right-wing voters). I think it is deeply ironic that the social democrats and their welfare system still has such a good ring to it - even if swedes in general now distrust the politicians of the left, they still approve of, cling to and want to keep trying to improve the welfare system.

It's been said that the swedish social democrats were formed to fend off a communist revolution, to give the workers a compromise so they would not demand the entire cake. Indeed affairs such as the one about the swedish secret intelligence agency is indicative of that agenda and has had the result that communism never had a deep impact on Sweden, never was crushed nor deeply hated. We had our cozy "communism light" which was reasonably successful and even if a different policy could have been even more successful, fair or free, the welfare state and the left is still strongly associated with goodness, security and justice for all in Sweden, quite regardless of its actual performance. In Sweden it is even relatively accepted to joke about being "stalinistic" (meaning being extremely disciplined and harsh) while the fascists are the demons here. It would be curious to see whether the Baltic states in an analog fashion avoid demonizing the lesser evil and how they view nazi influence in history since they certainly don't appreciate the memory of the Soviet "liberation".