Lame Duck

You know, this Juholtgate or what ever the press will name this is getting ridicules. The more is leaked, the more it seems that this is an internal problem in the party itself that is played out at front-stage for all the people to see. Now it seems that he have a hard time to survive the weekend after even more problems appearing. The citizen debacle last week? Apparently he said yes first and told the person in charge of those question that it was a go, then pulled back his support five hours later. There is some trouble with deducted twice as much for one car (both as his own and borrowed) and allegedly voices from within the party tells the story that those who elected him knew about these problems even though they deny it. Nothing left than to step down in order to save what's left of the public confidence in the party. I'm guessing that there will be a huge party meeting next year where a new leader is elected. Meaning that we will once again see the attacks between the possible candidates (who still doesn't want the assignment but will say yes when the party calls... after five times or so). I can't help but have a bit of shadenfraude over this, being a political bourgeois (a variation of the translated name given to the four non-socialistic parties with liberal and/or conservative ideology), I can't anything else than feel a satisfaction that the only party being able to wrestle the prime minister-post (or statsminister-post, I didn't think they had that distinction between those similar titles on wikipedia) away from the current government is so damaged it is hard to imagine that it will be able to recover, and this without the governmental parties doing anything.

Of course, it's 3 year left till the next election (and they already prepared the wikipedia page, as a political scientist I'm proud) so anything could possible happened. Although at this moment it doesn't look as who's gonna "win" the election, it's more interesting to see if the Alliance will be able to gain over 50 % of the votes and with that a majority (which of course from my side would be the best outcome). At least I feel a lot better now, the short lived depression I felt seems to have lifted. Funny how that is. It's also sad to see this once greatest party of them all so utterly weakened. It's easiest to look at the amount of time the different leaders sat at their post, the first one (after a two-year collective leadership) Claes Theolin sat 11 years, second Hjalmar Branting 18 years, third Per-Albin Hansson 21 years (both Branting and Hansson died while in office), then we have the fourth and one of the longest serving democratically elected leaders in the world, Tage Erlander, being both party leader and statsminister for 23 years in a row. The fourth was Olof Palme that sat for 17 years and was murdered in office by an unknown killer. Sixth one being Ingvar Carlsson sitting only 10 years. Following up in spot number seven is Göran Persson being able to hold the position for 11 years. Followed by Mona Sahlin (who was supposed to have the position after Carlsson, but due to certain scandals with a bad sense of economy forced her out of the loop for 11 years) who only sat for 4 years (and together with Theolin being the only Social democratic leaders not being statsminister). She was quickly followed by Håkan Juholt, who now seems to have to leave it already next year. Sitting only 1 year. And not being statsminister. While the bourgeois seems to sit in power through a minimum of three elections counting at least 12 years. Never happened before, how does that feel, eh?

Conclusion? Social democrats, get your act together. We need an opposition that we can work together with over the blocs in order to make way for infrastructure, pensions, energy, defense and foreign policies that are reliable. We can't have an imploded party taking up around 30 % of the voters and not be able to see what you want or not, maybe if you only had 15 %, but that means the governmental parties need to get at least 2 oppositional parties on the train otherwise we get an unstable government and market only damaging the people.