What the management of the pandemic could not do, it did the rent bill: the Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven was disheartened on Monday morning in Parliament with 181 deputies in favor, 109 against and 51 abstentions. The votes needed to pass the motion were 175. The prime minister and leader of the Social Democrats now has a week to resign or call early elections. the first time in the history of the country that a motion of no confidence brings down the government; ed it was since 1958 that an executive in Sweden had not finished his mandate.
–
The minority government of Social Democrat Stefan Lofven, on the fragile paper, still resisted since 2014. It even seemed to have gone through the most terrible year unscathed: the 2020 pandemic, when the Swedish model – that is, the government’s decision not to resort to lockdowns and restrictions as in neighboring countries and in the rest of Europe – it seemed to have caused many more deaths and contagions than the rest of the Scandinavian neighbors, and it had been criticized even by the king. Now to drop the controversial bill on rents, which is still in the initial draft stage but which the center-left parties are determined to scuttle.
–
The law would in fact provide, in open opposition to the model in force so far in the country, made up of controlled rents and state control of rents, a deregulation of the rents that owners of new buildings can impose on tenants. In short, a freer housing market, with fewer protections for tenants but greater incentives for owners of land to build new houses for the rental market, now too scarce from the supply point of view. Homeowners’ associations have long been asking for an adjustment of the calmieri on rents to the ever increasing cost of living, surged during Covid.
–
A low blow to the foundations of national welfare for the Left Party, which last week withdrew its support for the ruling coalition – an external support, having never been a part of it anyway – after an ultimatum, unheard, placed in Lofven on June 15. The right of the Swedish Democrats immediately took advantage, asking for a vote of confidence in the Riksdag, the Stockholm Parliament. Other opposition parties quickly lined up against Lofven, who has led the Scandinavian country for seven years. The frantic negotiations over the weekend to find a compromise with the Left Party, bringing together the tenants’ associations and those of the owners at the same table, have failed. Now Lofven now has two options: resign with the government or call new elections within a week (while the elections would be scheduled, according to the calendar, not before September 2022). But unspoken, with the two center-left and center-right blocs in substantial balance, that new elections would resolve the stalemate.
–
The leader of the Left Party was the protagonist of the collapse Nooshi Dadgostar, hard and pure who carried on hostility with the Social Democrats of Lofven to the extreme. Mehrnoosh Dadgostar, known as Nooshi, daughter of Iranian refugees who fled to Sweden in the Eighties, spent almost half of her 36 years in politics: a militant of the Youth Left since university – Law in Stockholm, never completed – from 2020 the party secretary of the Left. It is not we who have failed to support the government, the government which has ceased to support us and the Swedish citizens, he says today. Many fellow MEPs accuse her of irresponsibility for her ultimatum in Lofven. And why? I just did one rare thing in politics: I kept a promise.
–
–
June 21, 2021 (change June 21, 2021 | 12:09 pm)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
–
