Political stalemate looms amid far-right rise

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt pleaded for calm yesterday after being re-elected at the head of a minority government, while ruling out a deal with the country’s surging far-right.

Mr Reinfeldt said he would not collaborate with the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, now poised to hold the balance of power with 20 seats in the narrowly split Parliament.

But the future make-up of the centre-right premier’s government remained unclear, though he underlined he has until early October to announce his plans.

“We have obviously had a lot of questions on how this electoral result would be managed,” Mr Reinfeldt told reporters yesterday, adding: “There is no need to use words like chaos.”

Despite losing his parliamentary majority, Mr Reinfeldt’s coalition pulled off a historic victory on Sunday as the first right-leaning government to be re-elected in Sweden in nearly a century.

“We need a discussion, to let the results sink in,” he said.

Mr Reinfeldt said he would turn to the Greens to circumvent the far-right’s influence, stressing he has time to form his Cabinet. The next parliamentary session opens on October 4 with a roll-call of new members, and the speaker would announce the new government on October 5.

“My intention is to use the upcoming period to work through the challenges for Sweden. A clear presentation of the government needs to be made available by the beginning of October,” he told reporters.

For her part, Green Party co-chair Maria Wetterstrand yesterday said the party, which campaigned with the leftwing opposition, did not have a mandate from its voters to launch negotiations with Mr Reinfeldt’s centre-right Alliance.

However, the Greens other co-chair Peter Eriksson left open the possibility of negotiations but called on Mr Reinfeldt to hold talks with all the leftwing parties, including the Social Democrats and the formerly communist Left Party.

“The responsibility to manage this situation lies with the seven parties (besides the Sweden Democrats in Parliament), not just with one,” he told reporters.

“It would be strange if the largest party in Parliament (the Social Democrats) were not included in the discussion,” he said. The Social Democrats, historically the dominant force in Swedish politics, remained Parliament’s largest party after Sunday’s vote, but achieved their worst score since 1914 in what the press described as the “end of an era”.

Social Democrat leader Mona Sahlin, 53, failed in her bid to become Sweden’s first woman Prime Minister.

By late yesterday, a few calls for her resignation as leader had been sent out amid many messages of support, as the party formed a “crisis-unit” to re-examine its future.