“Sweden has always been extremely stable when it comes to our governments …”and the time it takes to form them.
After the election in 2014 (we have elections every four years) the government took office 19 days later. Until this year, in fact, it has never taken more than 25 days after an election to form a government; the average time is just six days.
Today, however, 86 days have passed since Sweden’s last election without a government having formed – a record by a wide margin.
Sweden’s national parliament consists of 349 members, divided in eight parties, of which seven formed blocs:
Left Wing party (V): extremely left wing on economic policies, globalism, liberal on immigration. 28 seats.
Green party (MP): environmentalist, for raising taxes, extremely liberal on immigration. 16 seats.
Social Democrats (S): largest party, historically almost always in power, more to the center than V and MP but still on the left. Also liberal on immigration but less than MP and V. 100 seats.
Liberal bloc (named the Alliance coalition):
Center party (C): liberal economic policies which means lowering taxes and making it easier to hire and fire. Extremely liberal on immigration and values (supporting feminism, affirmative action, hate speech laws, gender policies etc). 31 seats.
Liberal party (L): similar to Center party. More focus on pro-EU. 20 seats.
Christian Democrats (KD): liberal economic policies (lowering taxes, easier to hire and fire etc), a bit more conservative on values and culture (less feminism, affirmative action, gender policies etc). 22 seats.
The Moderates (M): the second largest party and historically the party that has competed with the Social Democrats for the post of the prime minister. They are also liberal on economic issues and used to be extremely liberal on immigration. They did, however, change drastically in the last few years, due to the success of the Sweden Democrats. 70 seats.
- The Sweden Democrats (SD): new kid on the “bloc”.