Sweden: Prime Minister Loses Confidence Vote

It took four months that crossed 2018 and 2019 for Sweden to form a government. The government that formed was a minority government where 115 MPs voted in favor of the Social Democrats led government while 153 voted against. The reason why a minority party was allowed to form was that there were 77 abstentions. In essence, those 77 tacitly voted for the minority party. Three parties abstained: Left Party, Centre Party and Liberals. (And it looks like 4 just didn't vote.) This prevented the "No" vote from reaching of 175.

Here's what the Associated Press via the LA Times (Jun 21) has to say:

The no-confidence motion in Lofven’s government was called by the nationalist Sweden Democrats party, but it ultimately succeeded because the Left Party had withdrawn its support from the government over proposed legislation to tackle a housing shortage. Lawmakers voted 181 to 109 against Lofven, with 51 abstentions.

The Left Party said it lost confidence in Lofven over a proposal to abolish rent controls on newly built properties.

Sweden has strict regulations on rents aimed at maintaining affordable prices in larger cities. However, this makes property developers less willing to invest in building new homes for the rental market. People wanting to rent a home can wait years for a contract and buying property is increasingly hard amid soaring home prices.

First, it appears that the Social Democrats led government lost 6 votes (going from 115 to 109) from the vote that took place in 2019. Since only 2 parties (Social Democrats and Greens) supported Lofven in 2019 and he is the leader of the Social Democrats, I suspect that the shifted votes were from the Green Party. I tried to Google the voting breakdowns, but wasn't able to locate it anywhere so this is just my speculation.

Second, nice to see the Associated Press taking a conservative point of view when it comes to rent control with the statement, "However, this makes property developers less willing to invest in building new homes for the rental market."

The Guardian (Jun 21) had these quotes:

The Left party blamed the prime minister for the crisis, with its leader, Nooshi Dadgostar, saying the Social Democrat-led government had “given up on the Left party and the Swedish people”, rather than the other way round.

The political commentator Mats Knutson told the public broadcaster SVT: “For a long time it looked like the minority government would make it until the end of the term, but the built-in divisions in the government’s base have finally become too big.”

I shouldn't dispute the conclusions by political commentator Mats Knutson as he lives in Sweden and I am an outside observer, but I did run across this article from The Local Sweden (Jun 2) that was a couple weeks prior to the actual vote. It looked a recent polling data for the various political parties:

Because of Sweden’s political model, one of the larger parties would need the support of smaller parties in order to form a government. But the threshold for getting a seat in parliament is 4 percent – a threshold the Liberals and the Greens are currently at risk of not making. If only one of them gets in, it could tip the election either in favour of the left (if the Greens get in, but the Liberals do not) or the right (vice versa).

I wonder if the Left Party looked into 2022 (when their next election will be held) and thought maybe they could get a political bounce out of the rent control issue? I guess I'm just putting a different spin on the rent control issue. Mats Knutson seems to be saying that this issue was too big of a divide for the Left Party. I'm saying the Left Party is using this issue to gain some polling strength.