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| From a rose garden I passed by last week |
♫ I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden
Along with the sunshine there's gotta be a little rain sometime
When you take you gotta give so live and let live or let go
I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden ♫
Lynn Anderson's old hit came to mind while I was pondering how to present this post, following up on the situation in Swedish politics. (Feel free to skip the politics, and just enjoy the roses and the music, if you prefer! Full Youtube video hopefully included at the bottom, if the link works out as intended.)
Today our parliament took another vote, this time with the result that our previous Prime Minister (recently resigned after a vote of no confidence against him in the parliament) made a comeback and was elected as 'new' Prime Minister. An outcome that was more or less expected - at least since Monday, when the opposition's candidate stepped down, declaring that he had not been able to find enough support to form a new government.
The new government will be pretty much the same as before, i.e. a minority government consisting of the Social Democrats + the Green Party. However, their position now may be seen as even weaker, as old agreements have fallen, and one minor support party, the Liberals, has joined "the other side". And the two support parties that remain, the Centre and the Left, agree on very little except that they do still prefer this government to a right-wing alternative which would include the "extreme right" party, the Sweden Democrats.
Whether the government will also manage to gather enough support in the parliament to pass their budget later on in the autumn, still remains to be seen, though. Our PM Stefan Löfven is known as a skillful negotiator but this may be his toughest job so far. On the other hand, no one on either side is likely to be keen on a snap election only months before the next regular election in September 2022... So I suppose they're hoping to make things work until then somehow, with compromises, and by postponing the most controversial issues.
