Nicholas John Mead
New Left Project
Sweden is regularly held up as a model of social democracy, equality and of a "cradle-to-grave" welfare state. But while it still has a welfare state and level of equality that's ahead of most countries, the truth is that it has been in terminal decline for the past 40 years. The astonishing thing is, this decline has happened under a liberal center-left government – the Social Democrats – who have been the ruling party in Sweden for all but 13 of the last 78 years. It is their failure to stand-up for working Swedes that has seen the country shift even more to the right in this year's General Election. While many liberal-left Swedes are outraged at the success of a racist far-right party in this year's election, they show little outrage at this right-wing attack on their society by liberal-left wing governments since the 1970s.
Sweden's social democracy and welfare state reached a peaked in the 1950s and 60s when unemployment reached virtually zero for a while and it was considered one of the richest countries in the world. Since the 1970s however, Sweden's welfare state has been subject to a series of vicious attacks by successive center-left Social Democratic governments which have failed to stand-up to corporations and international right-wing organizations such as the IMF and OECD and aggressively applied pro-corporate neo-liberal economic policies ushered in by the Reagan and Thatcher eras and which still continue today.
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