A SWITCH IN SWEDEN

...These are the results of the two elections in terms of seats: environmental causes and emphasizes "decentralization" of industry, people and decision-making on land-use and economic planning...

...we'll try more...

...Taxes have been high for a long time, but by now an average worker sees about a third of his income go to the national, county or local government...

...The Moderates, the right wing of the bourgeois bloc, are far from reactionary...

...If so, the Liberal success could just possibly be the beginning of an ultimate convergence of liberalism and socialism that would parallel on the ideological side the mixed economy and "functional" socialism that have characterized Sweden's economic life...

...In truth, conservatives don't have much to be happy about...

...The party has always been split between more and less ideological elements...

...To that question the Social Democrats seemed to be answering: No, you haven't...

...Although the union proposal was not officially embraced by the Social Democrats, it was made an election issue, and it apparently helped to focus many people's fear that radical new changes might be made in traditional forms of ownership...

...In the past both the Liberals and the Center have formed coalitions with the Social Democrats...

...Sweden is also an energy-dependent country without coal or oil...

...Still, there had to be some reason for the defeat of the party that had engineered prosperity and social justice and had come to be a kind of security blanket for Swedes with a deep folk memory of poverty...

...His stand summed up Swedish uneasiness about high technology and seemed to attract wide support, especially among young voters-and nearly 500,000 new voters had been added to the rolls this year by a drop in the voting age from 20 to 18...

...It is interesting and perhaps significant that it was the small Liberal party that gained the most seats...

...one result is that there is less nationalization of industry in Sweden than in many other West European countries...

...They have a somewhat old-fashioned rationalist, ideologically individualist bent...

...they call themselves the "middle parties" and are nervous about coalition with the Moderates, whom they would exclude from the new Cabinet if they could...

...The permeability of the socialist-bourgeois barrier was demonstrated during the three years of equally divided legislative power...

...As it turned out, die Center did less well than its coalition partners, and so it may be that Falldin's audacious ploy backfired...

...armand schwab, jr...

...It was a close election and the winning bloc is not about to erase any of Sweden's social programs...

...The Liberals are for "social reform without socialism...

...Meanwhile the Swedes became officially the world's richest people (outside of some Arab oil fiefdoms): Sweden had a per capita GNP of $6,720 in 1974, according to the World Bank, followed by Switzerland ($6,650) and the U.S...

...One other issue must be mentioned, if only because it was so Swedish: nuclear power...

...would gradually transfer majority control of all such companies to the unions...

...The plan...

...Palme, on the other hand, said it was the nuclear issue that cost his party the election...

...SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC DEFEAT A SWITCH IN SWEDEN "The conservatives will be happy all over the world," Olof Palme said when his Social Democratic party was defeated in Sweden last month after 44 years in power...

...The civil service has always been heavy-handed (if generally capable and very honest) Social Democrats Communists 1973 156 19 1976 152 17 Change -A -2 175 169 -6 Liberals Center Moderates 34 90 51 39 86 55 +5 -4 +4 175 180 +5 That is not much of a change, and in left-right terms it is even less dramatic...

...Armand Schwab, Jr., an editor of Scientific American, has lived and traveled in Sweden...

...It was a time when the opposition could effectively ask: Had enough...

...The Center, formerly the agrarian party, specifically supports the mixed economy and welfare but champions in Sweden, but after 44 years the bureaucracy came to be perceived as specifically Social Democratic, its civil-service rigidity blended with socialist dogmatism...

...A loose coalition of the three "bourgeois" parties, having run a dead heat with the "socialist" parties (Social Democrats and Communists) in 1973, took control of the 349-seat Parliament this time by getting 1.9 percent more of the vote while the socialists went down 1.3 percent...

...Unemployment remained under control and inflation slowed down...

...Environmental concerns are the exclusive property of the world's upper-middle classes, and Sweden is an upper-middle-class country in which large numbers of people really worry about polluted air and water, overconsumption, adulterated foods, vanishing wilderness and technology in general...

...Recently, however, the big blue-collar Confederation of Trade Unions, which is intimately allied with the party, has pressed for a radical new step: a requirement that firms employing 50 or more persons allot 20 per cent of their profits to placing shares of company stock in workers' funds controlled by the unions...

...The pragmatists have usually won out...

...Perhaps the best explanation was suggested by Bernard Wein-raub in the New York Times: the Social Democrats defeated themselves...

...The normally careful Swedes had made the mistake of creating a 350-seat Parliament for the 1973 election and the two blocs had ended up with 175 seats each...

...Thorbjorn Falldin, the Center Party leader who is now the country's new Prime Minister, made the nuclear-power program a central issue...

...It was not a time of governmental stalemate...

...There were some tax cuts but also some new social programs, including dental insurance, a remarkable new plan for flexible retirement between 60 and 70, and new industrial-democracy legislation that allows workers, through their unions, to share a broad range of traditional management prerogatives...

...The government has built five nuclear power plants and proposed to build eight more by 1985...

...The tax and bureaucracy grievances were combined and dramatized by two income-tax cases, that of Ingmar Bergman and that of Astrid Lindgren, a popular writer of children's books...

...Could a large number of Swedes have sensed in the Liberal party a humane and humanizing counterbalance to the cool, managerial approach of the Social Democrats...

...Palme retorted that Falldin's proposal would cost thousands of jobs and leave Sweden dependent on Middle East oil...

...the Social Democrats stayed in office, with rare tie votes decided by lot...

...The Social Democrats seldom needed to rely on Communist votes, picking up enough support instead from Liberals or Centrists or both, depending on the issue...

...The number of seats was quickly reduced to avoid the possibility of another tie...

...6,640...

...when I talked with party youth leaders, it was the Liberal Youth chairman who had the most lively, egalitarian position...

...He attacked nuclear reactors and their radioactive wastes as unsafe and said he would not build the eight proposed plants and would even close down the five operating ones...

...In the long run the results of the election may tend to strengthen, in Sweden and elsewhere in West Europe, what appears to be a trend toward an unideological mix of social-welfare capitalism and democratic socialism, fueled by private enterprise as well as by government investment and transfer payments, and leavened by individualist traditions...

...In Sweden one votes for a party, not individuals, and seats are allocated by proportional representation...

...The Liberals are similar to the British Liberals, with a reformist tradition and some radical tendencies...

...Four decades of the Swedish combination of social insurance, planning and private enterprise finally made enough people affluent enough so that a few more of them became sensitive to long-standing complaints that had been slowly reducing the Social Democrats' support since 1968...