Swedish Social Democratic Party

His radical socialist views were widened even further on a trip to Asia, specifically India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Japan, where he saw firsthand the destructive consequences of colonialism and imperialism.

Returning to Sweden in 1949, where we started this episode, and having seen the world and learned something from it, Palma plunged himself into politics, joining the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

Brilliant and restless, he quickly made an impression.

In debate, he could take an opponent apart.

Hi, James.

This week on the podcast, we'll be asking what the heck Sweden's Social Democrats are up to.

They won the election, kind of, but since then they've been acting like bit players.

What's going on? We'll be looking also at people with partners or children in Sweden who nonetheless get told to leave the country.

Up to now, fingers have been pointed at the centre party and the left party for their failure to compromise.

Just as a reminder, the centre party refuses to have left party members of the government, ministers, and the left party refuses to support a government in which it doesn't have ministers.

But now frustration is increasingly being expressed about the failure of Sweden's largest party and the supposed winner of the election, the Social Democrats, to take charge of the process.

A senior Social Democrat, Lind Svanspult, spoke in a long interview with Svenska Dagbladet about the party's failure to lay the groundwork before the election for cooperation between the four centre and left of centre parties.

That would be the main thing.

Do you think that's possible? I mean, in 2018, you know, the Center Party got the Social Democrats to accept a lot of extremely painful concessions.

Yeah.

I mean, this is maybe even more painful than what the Center Party inflicted on the Social Democrats back then.

But I mean, can you see the Sweden Democrats accepting that? Maybe thinking that they'll manage to keep a bit more migration policy than they would under the Social Democrats.

Yeah, I think, and also based on the reactions that this article has got, I think the likelihood is very, very small.

But while the Social Democrats, they did, well, in 2018, they made really very, very big concessions when it came to policy, but that also made the Center Party shift side in politics.

which has been very important for the Social Democrats from a strategic point of view in the long run.

But in 1986, Olof Palme is shot and the dialogue with the PLO is put on hold.

So the focus was very much on finding a way forward for the important Social Democratic Party and for Sweden

in general.

But now with the first Intifada underway, Swedish Foreign Minister Sten Andersson decides to travel there and see the situation with his own eyes.

Now for something else that is maybe not being done exactly as it should be and which is also a bit terrifying, the efforts to form Sweden's next government.

So on Monday, the Speaker of the Parliament, Andreas Norlén, passed the task of trying to build a workable coalition to Elisabethtan Dringqvist, leader of the Centre Party.

Emma, did that come as a surprise? It

came as a little bit of a surprise to me anyway, but maybe that's because I don't know anything about Swedish politics anyway, because I had predicted that he was going to pick Ulf Kristesson next as the leader of Sweden's second biggest party and the leader of the opposition, which I think he had even hinted previously that he might, that that's the sort of second person to go to after Magdalena Andersson.

So it came as a bit of a surprise to me, but at the same time, Elisabeth Ann Rinkvist had also been mentioned as a possible candidate.

I just thought that she would maybe be the third one, something like that.

But apparently a lot of the party leaders suggested that Elisabeth Ann Rinkvist would be the right person to go next, because she's been talking about this kind of centrist coalition that she wants to build.

What has she said so far about what she hopes to do? And has anything happened yet? I mean, do we know who she's met or anything about what's been going on this week?

So more than a month has passed since Sweden's election, and we still don't have a government.

Um, Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson said on Tuesday that she didn't see any prospect of forming an administration, despite discussions with the left, green and center parties last week.

And it looks very much like she will be voted down by MPs in parliament in the minutes to come as we record this.

Now, Christian Democrat leader Ebba Busch says discussions are being held about a prospective, um, center-right government, whatever that's supposed to mean, and polls show that the right-wing parties now have a healthy lead over the left.

Emma, put like this, it sounds like Magdalena Andersson's goose is cooked, but she's still somehow the favorite to become prime minister, right?

See, when you put it like that, James, you know, in my part of Sweden, in the south of Sweden here, we eat goose in November, so when you say that her goose is cooked, that sounds like a nice thing to me.

Like, we know that because all the parties have said that they're going to vote no.

But yes, she's still the favorite, if only because there is no one [laughs] who stands a better chance.

I guess what I see going on in PR countries is that people have positive strategic choices as opposed to negative ones.

You know, there was a situation in Sweden in the 1990s where the Labour Party, the traditional left party, kind of moved to the right, started adopting some policies that their supporters didn't like.

And so a significant group of their voters actually decided to vote for a different left wing party.

That was strategy.

They didn't think that voting for that other party, that they would win the election, but they knew that it would affect the Labour Party.

Right.

They knew that the Labour Party would go, oh, wait a minute.

We were taking those voters for granted.

Party spokesperson Jessica Stegrud describes the current proposal as far too vague for her party.

The Social Democrats and three other major political parties want an immediate stop to all of these removals.

This intense political debate follows strict new citizenship requirements from earlier this past summer.

Partiet Sverigedemokraterna vägrade den fjortonde oktober 2026 att stödja ett helt nytt lagförslag om paus för utvisning av unga tonåringar.

Talespersonen Jessica Stegrud beskriver det nuvarande förslaget om ett stopp som alldeles för otydligt för deras politiska parti.

Socialdemokraterna tillsammans med tre andra stora partier vill se ett omedelbart stopp för alla dessa pågående utvisningar.

Denna intensiva politiska debatt beror på det nya, mycket stränga kraven för svenskt medborgarskap från juni 2026.

A new digital sexual health clinic in the Jönköping region is already fully booked for the next two months.