NYT : Conservatives Take Lead in Swedish Election

Conservatives Take Lead in Swedish Election

By SARAH LYALL and IVAR EKMAN | September 17, 2006

STOCKHOLM, Sept. 17 — Sweden appeared set to sweep away 12 years of center-left government today, voting to reject its longtime prime minister, Goran Persson, in favor of a conservative candidate who has pledged to renew the Swedish welfare state.

With 5,327 out of 5,783 precincts counted at 10:23 p.m. Swedish time, a little more than two hours after the polls closed, the Social Democrats and their left-of-center allies had taken 46.6 percent of the vote, compared with 47.7 percent for a right-of-center coalition led by Fredrik Reinfeldt, the leader of the Moderate Party.

Mr. Reinfeldt’s four-party coalition polled strongly ahead of the Social Democrats throughout the day. But the gap closed by the evening, and though the Moderates were still considered likely to win, the race was too close to call.

The Social Democrats, one of the world’s most consistently successful political parties, have governed Sweden alone or in coalitions with other parties for 65 of the past 74 years. The party’s apparent defeat reflects a feeling not only that Mr. Persson has become complacent in office, but also that Sweden’s celebrated social welfare model, with its high tax rate and generous benefits, has encouraged too many people to stay out of work for too long.

Mr. Persson himself has been in power for 10 years, making him the second-longest serving prime minister in the European Union, after Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg. Although he led Sweden out of the recession of the early 1990’s and has presided over a strong economy, his critics said he had become too comfortable in his incumbency.

“There’s a sense that the government has become tired, that it’s been drifting, really,” Nicholas Aylott, a political scientist at Sodertorn University, said in an interview. “It hasn’t been clear where the Social Democrats want to lead Sweden.”

Mr. Reinfeldt made unemployment a major issue in the campaign. By most measures, Sweden is thriving economically: the economy is growing this year at a projected annual rate of 4.1 percent, and the official unemployment rate is 5.7 percent.

But with its generous social services and high unemployment benefits, Mr. Reinfeldt argues, Sweden has encouraged a vast swath of people to stay out of the labor market altogether, a particularly acute problem for an aging population where many older people are no longer working.

Styling the Moderates as “the new labor party,” Mr. Reinfeldt said that in Mr. Persson’s view, “security is living on subsidies.” By contrast, he said in a recent interview, his party is “saying that security is the ability to work and to stand on your own two feet.”

Mr. Reinfeldt has pledged to revitalize the economy by cutting payroll taxes for low-income workers, reducing unemployment benefits from the current high of 80 percent of a worker’s last salary, raising educational standards to better prepare students for work in a competitive market and encouraging employers to hire the long-term unemployment through new tax credits.

“The election’s big issue was the poor functioning of the labor market,” Mr. Aylott said. “The fact that so many people don’t have work has to be considered a major failing of the Social Democratic government, given that they’ve presided over such a long period of economic growth.”

But in a country that likes stability, Mr. Reinfeldt was not running on a radical platform. He has been at pains all along to cast his plans as a fine-tuning, rather than a fullscale overhaul, of Sweden’s economic model. “The Nordic welfare model is in many aspects a good model,” he said as he campaigned today, “but it needs more of a choice for individuals.”

In a series of television and radio debates, Mr. Persson tried to portray his opponent as a classic conservative disguised as a mild-mannered moderate. Evoking the premiership of the last conservative prime minister, Carl Bildt, who governed in the early 1990’s, Mr. Persson said the conservatives would eventually begin tampering with the country’s system of high taxes, a large public sector and generous benefits.

In the previous election, four years ago, Mr. Reinfeldt’s party was trounced at the polls when it ran on a conventional platform of big tax cuts and deep reductions in social benefits. When he became party leader, Mr. Reinfeldt acknowledged that such a stance was unlikely to win any elections in a country that is essentially happy with its underlying big-government, high-tax system.

So Mr. Reinfeldt moved his party toward the center, restyled it the New Moderates, pledged to govern as a coalition with the other three largest right-of-center parties, and settled on unemployment as an issue on which the government would be particularly vulnerable.

Mr. Reinfeldt’s apparent victory hardly heralds a revolutionary change or sweeping repudiation of the past in a country whose people are basically happy with the way things are. But today, there was a sense that something momentous was afoot.

“This year, you’ve felt vibrations that you haven’t felt before,” Mattias Jonsson, a 30-year-old banker who was voting for the Moderates, said in an interview outside a Stockholm polling station. “This time, there is a real alternative.”

Meanwhile, Magnus Rosander, a 44-year-old computer engineer who had a nervous breakdown after losing his job four years ago and has not worked since, said he had voted for the Social Democrats and was worried about what would happen under the Moderates.

“I’m dependent on social welfare,” Mr. Rosander said outside a subway station in central Stockholm. “If Fredrik Reinfeldt wins, we will get less money and he will force me to work even though my doctor says I’m not ready yet.”

Some voters said that regardless of the differences between the parties, they felt simply that the Social Democrats, and Mr. Persson, had been in power for too long.

Frida Henriksson, who is 26 and works in telephone sales for a large Swedish company, said she had voted for Mr. Reinfeldt because “it feels like I have a lot more in common with him” than with Mr. Persson.

Ms. Henriksson, heading home after an afternoon of shopping in downtown Stockholm, said: “There’s nothing wrong with the country, but it could be better. It’s time for a change, to see what someone else can achieve.”