Reply #11: It was not taxes

[Stockholm]

in the sense that the conservatives won partly because they toned down the talk about taxes, they even went as far as to say that the tax deductions they would propose would only be targeted at low income workers and fully financed to be proposed.

The election was won and lost on jobs. The conservatives where better at formulating the problem around young people are having a hard time finding a job, a lot of people is caught in the trap that our social security system has become and to many in government programmes not enough proper jobs. To be fair the conservatives exaggerated a bit but it worked.

The ruling party went to election with the message that everything is fine (which it largely is) but that the Swedes could expect more of the same - in short they were content...

Add the arrogance of the party leader Goran Persson, which is the real reason I voted conservatively for the first time ever and the election was lost (and believe me a lot of social democrats did the same). The party has been sliding to the right for a decade and now looks more like a centrist liberal party than a proper social democratic party. This has been disastrous for the political life in Sweden. The conservatives have not had to act like an opposition party because the government have fulfilled their every wet privatization and liberalisation dream.

This way we get a crippled conservative government that has triangulated the shit out of themselves and will now act more as social liberals than conservatives and a pressure on the opposition party of the Social democrats to move back to the left - and kick the disgusting Persson into retirement.

One reason it has come to this is that the candidate who was the first choice among everyone to succeed the PM, Mrs. Anna Lind was tragically killed a couple of years back. There simple weren´t any natural successors and the PM decided to stay on.