Sweden’s parties agree to form a government with far-right backing
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Three Swedish right-wing parties will form a minority government with unprecedented backing from the far-right Sweden Democrats, the four parties said on Friday, immediately revealing plans to build new nuclear reactors and crack down on crime and immigration.
The incoming government will consist of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, with the far-right Sweden Democrats remaining outside the coalition but providing key support in the Riksdag.
The four unveiled a roadmap Friday for their cooperation, outlining measures to address rising crime, immigration, energy policy, health care, education and the economy.
“Change is not only necessary, but possible, and the four of us can deliver that,” conservative Moderates leader Ulf Kristesson told reporters.
The Riksdag will vote on Kristersson as the new prime minister on Monday and the future government is expected to take office on Tuesday, just over a month after the right won a narrow victory in a parliamentary election that ousted the Social Democrats after eight years in power.
The four right-wing parties together hold 176 out of 349 seats in parliament.
The anti-immigration and nationalist Sweden Democrats, once shunned as pariahs on Sweden’s political scene, were the big winners of the September 11 vote.
They emerged as the country’s second largest party with a record 20.5 percent of the vote, behind outgoing Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats, which have dominated Swedish politics since the 1930s.
While far-right leader Jimmie Åkesson said he “would have preferred to be in government”, he stressed that the most important thing was that his party, as the largest right-wing party, has influence over politics.
“We will deliver policy, particularly in the areas that our constituents think are particularly important, and crime policy is one such area,” he told reporters.
While the quartet presented a united front on Friday, they have traditionally been divided on a number of key policy areas and major concessions were made in the agreement, mainly to meet the demands of the far right.
Sweden has struggled to curb soaring gang shootings and violence, and the roadmap calls for the introduction of visitor zones in certain vulnerable areas, harsher punishments for repeat offenders, double sentences for certain crimes and anonymous witnesses – all major concessions from the small Liberal Party.
The incoming government also plans to make major cuts to Sweden’s generous refugee policy and reduce the number of quota refugees from 6,400 last year to 900 per year during its four-year mandate.
It will also scrap Sweden’s aid target of one percent of gross national income and introduce a national ban on begging.
The four parties also agreed not to cut unemployment benefits, a major concession to the extreme right from the Moderates.
“What has been most important for the Sweden Democrats is that the change of government represents a paradigm shift,” said Åkesson.
At the same time, the future government also announced plans to build new nuclear reactors to meet the country’s increasing electricity needs.
“New nuclear reactors will be built,” Christian Democrat leader Ebba Busch told reporters.
“We must meet our end of the Paris Agreement, but without destroying the economy of companies and Swedish households. The goal going forward is electrification and the way there is nuclear power,” she said.
The Scandinavian country voted in a non-binding referendum in 1980 to phase out nuclear power.
In recent years, the country has shut down six of its 12 reactors and the remaining ones, at three nuclear power plants, generate about 30 percent of the electricity used in the country today.
But it has struggled to find viable alternative energy sources to replace nuclear power, with renewables not yet able to fully meet its needs.
The outgoing Social Democratic government, in power for the past eight years, has traditionally opposed the construction of new reactors but acknowledged earlier this year that nuclear power would be essential for the foreseeable future.
The Swedish energy group Vattenfall therefore said in June that it is investigating the possibility of building at least two small modular nuclear reactors (SMR).
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