Swedish PM Stefan Löfven loses noconfidence vote
Sweden’s parliament has backed a noconfidence vote in the centre-left prime minister, Stefan Löfven, making him the first premier to be ousted by opposition MPs in the country’s history and giving him a week to resign or call snap elections.
The vote, called by the nationalist Sweden Democrats barely a year before a general election, plunges Sweden back into political uncertainty two years after the last inconclusive poll produced a deadlocked parliament and led to months of negotiations to form the current Social Democrat-Green coalition.
Löfven’s fragile minority government has been propped up by tacit support from two small centre-right parties and the formerly communist Left party, which withdrew its backing over plans to ease rent controls on new apartments.
After the vote, the Social Democrat leader, 63, said he wanted to “take some time”, although “not necessarily the whole week”, to decide on his next step. “Regardless of what happens, I and my party will be available to shoulder the responsibility for leading the country,” he said. “My focus has and will always be to do the best for Sweden.”
The motion, voted on by all 349 MPs despite Covid restrictions, needed 175 votes to pass and got 181. The Sweden Democrat leader, Jimmie Åkesson, told parliament the government was historically weak and “should never have come to power”.
The Left party blamed the prime minister for the crisis, with its leader, Nooshi Dadgostar, saying the Social Democrat-led government had “given up on the Left party and the Swedish people”, rather than the other way round.
The political commentator Mats
Knutson told the public broadcaster SVT: “For a long time it looked like the minority government would make it until the end of the term, but the built-in divisions in the government’s base have finally become too big.”
Last-ditch efforts by the Social Democrats to appease the Left party, which has 27 MPs, over the weekend proved in vain, with the party insisting the government’s plans to overhaul rent controls, potentially opening the door for landlords to freely set rents for new-build apartments, ran counter to Sweden’s social model.
Three scenarios now look possible: Löfven could resign, leaving the parliamentary speaker with the job of finding a new majority; a snap election could be called, even though the 2022 poll must proceed as planned; or a political compromise could allow the government to stay on in a caretaker capacity.
However, with the two main left and rightwing blocs still deadlocked in parliament and evenly balanced in opinion polls, it is not clear how a new administration could be formed or whether fresh elections would resolve the situation.
Analysts said they expected Löfven to resign, but added that the former union boss, who is famed for his backroom negotiating skills, could well return.
“I think nobody wants an extra election … and the Social Democrats would, according to recent polls, lose quite a lot of votes in an election right now,” said Anders Sannerstedt, a political scientist at Lund University.
Sannerstedt told Agence-France Presse that if the prime minister departed, the continuing parliamentary deadlock could allow him to rise again. Jonas Hinnfors, a political scientist from the University of Gothenburg, agreed.
“He is an extremely good negotiator,” Hinnfors said. “Given that the seat distribution is the same, the most likely outcome is that Löfven will come back.”
However, Nicholas Aylott, a political scientist at Södertörn University, described the defeat of a prime minister in a no-confidence vote as a “very significant” event in Swedish political history. “I think an extra election is a real possibility,” Aylott said.