Chapter 20: Anatomy of SuccessProtest Voting; Liberal Party and protest votes; Anti-establishment feeling now in majority; Green Party cause and effect in protest process; Growth of Green political power 1982-88; High quality of Green think tanks in Sweden; Effect of Green ideas on other parties;
Let us now look at the past three elections in the Stockholm City Region when set out along these new lines.
Figure11: Stockholm Seats by Party Category 1982-1988 Politicians Structuralists S M Fp C Total Kds Vpk Mp Total 1982 26 23 4 5 58 - 7 - 7 1985 25 20 11 3 59 - 6 - 6 1988 23 18 11 3 55 - 7 5 12 The Swedish political establishment would like to portray the seats won by the Communists and the Greens in 1988 as mere protest votes. But here the Grey Parties are whistling in the wind. The key to understanding why this is so can best be seen by considering this proposition in a somewhat broader context in which the role of the Liberal Party is crucial.
Here is the picture in Stockholm for the three parties who have been the beneficiaries of protest votes over the past three elections. It is a pattern repeated in Gothenburg, Malmö and throughout ‘Islandia’.
Figure12: The Rise in the Protest Vote in Stockholm 1982-1988 Communists Liberals Greens Protest Seats Total Seats % 1982 7 4 - 11 65 17% 1985 6 11 - 17 65 26% 1988 7 11 5 23 67 34% So from 17% in 1982, the parties benefiting from protest voters have increased their share of seats in parliament to 26% in 1985 and to 34% in 1988. And this, it should be noted, took place alongside increasing support for the SRP, the Sofa Recliners Party, which took only 8% in 1982 but had doubled their share of the vote by the time of the 1988 elections implying an anti-establishment coalition representing half of the country.
If there is not a majority in favour of radical structural change (and the teenage population will normally incline to radical change in a healthy society in which real alternatives are fairly presented) then there is little doubt there is a faction abroad in the Swedish political landscape which has sufficient ‘hearts and minds’ support to strip the ‘business as usual’ faction of their three quarters of a century monopoly of national parliamentary power.
If we now look briefly at the history of the Swedish Green Party, it seems they have been both cause and effect in this process; both the catalyst and the beneficiary.
The Green Party first set up its stall in the Swedish political party market place for the 1982 local district council elections. Significantly, one of the founders of the party resigned as a Liberal Member of Parliament for this purpose.
By the time the 1985 elections came around, the Green Party was still small, but it had made significant inroads into district councils throughout the political market place and had a party ‘anti-organization’ working to elect Green members to both district and county councils in 1985. It did not sweep the board or anything of that nature, but it received good media coverage and repeated in the county councils the 1982 inroads into the district councils.
In 1988, for the first time, Green Party candidates were standing in the national elections and they were being supported by a dedicated support team and a nationally oriented election manifesto. Shrewdly anticipating the charges that would be thrown at them, they made sure that they had available alternative national budgets and well-reasoned and well-written programmes for the areas of conventional economic debate, such as unemployment, growth and taxes, in which they met the ‘establishment views’, challenged many of the premises on which these views rested, and then went on to lay out a new set of premises fully worked through into the language of ‘door-step electioneering’.
This was a mighty intellectual and political achievement and other green parties throughout the world would be well advised to translate the Swedish Green Party 1988 election manifesto into their own language for adaptation to their own cultural premises.
And so in Sweden during the eighties, not only has a sympathetic media been fairly reporting environmental issues, but the sound scholarship and shrewd politics of the Green Party has been ensuring that these issues are brought to the fore in the run-up to the three-yearly election.
It was this shifting political agenda together with the ever widening critique of ‘establishment premises’ stirred up by academics and activists as well as by the unfolding pattern of events in the real world which seemed to bear out the message which was the root cause of the 1985 anti-establishment current. This was not available to the Greens because they decided not to contest the national election. It was also unavailable to the Labour and Conservative parties as these were widely regarded as the doyens of the political establishment and the determinants of the election agenda as well as the guilty parties against which protest was directed.
The Christian Democrats at this time were standing with the Farmers Party on a common list designed to ensure the election of the Christian Democrats leader into the Swedish Parliament, while the Communists were always the victim of the Cold War mentality pervading ‘the free world’ in pre-perestroika days, being seen as the agents of a foreign power in a way which ‘capitalist parties’ like the Conservatives have always avoided.
In 1985 the disarray was well exploited by the Liberal Party, who gave the green critique a pink ribbon by wrapping it up in suburban packaging and, ‘playing to the ladies,’ picked up the protest vote.
But in 1988 there was a Green Party on the hustings. Three years of participation in knob twiddling as part of the coalition of party leaders intended to provide the Swedish equivalent of ‘Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’ had removed much of the Liberals 1985 radical disguise, and the Swedish Labour Party had moved to recover the policy ground usurped from them in 1985.