When and why do political actors make strategic changes to policy positions and ways of cooperating? While this has been a long-standing question in the field (see e.g. Downs Reference Downs1957), changes to party systems in recent decades have drawn increased attention to what prompts these shifts in the first place. To explain the timing and rationale for a strategic change, scholars point to the role of voters’ changing preferences (Klüver and Spoon, Reference Klüver and Spoon2016; Oesch and Rennwald Reference Oesch and Rennwald2018), recent election results (Adams Reference Adams2012; Somer-Topcu Reference Somer-Topcu2009), competitors’ actions (Abou-Chadi and Krause Reference Abou-Chadi and Krause2020; Koedam Reference Koedam2022) as well as changes to issue salience (Abou-Chadi et al. Reference Abou-Chadi, Mitteregger and Mudde2021). However, the intra-organizational dynamics that set such changes in motion have received less attention. As Georg Wenzelburger and Zohlnhöfer (Reference Wenzelburger and Zohlnhöfer2021) put it, the ‘electoral turn’ in party scholarship has largely left the black box of political actors and their preferences unopened.
In this article, we study how the organized Swedish labour movement, in the form of the Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokratiska Arbetarpartiet, SAP) and the blue-collar union confederation (Landsorganisationen i Sverige, LO), has responded to the rise of radical right-wing populist parties (RRPs), in the form of the Sweden Democrats (SD), and how the two organizations have debated their response options internally. Our focus is the period between 2007 and 2018, as this was when the SD rose from obscurity and became a key party in Swedish politics. Analysing ‘the labour movement’ is essential to understand the centre-left’s internal dynamics regarding strategy formation, since it includes two separate yet also closely linked organizations represented by a political wing (the SAP) and an economic one (the LO) (Jansson Reference Jansson, Allern and Bale2017).
We consider the Swedish case (see further Gerring Reference Gerring2007) to be an illuminating example of the de- and realignment of the political space following the relative decline of Social Democratic parties and the rise of RRPs (Rennwald and Pontusson Reference Rennwald and Pontusson2021). The case also highlights particular challenges facing labour movements more broadly, that typically act as a shield against RRPs ‘stealing’ votes from the centre-left (see further Oskarson and Demker Reference Oskarson and Demker2015; Rydgren Reference Rydgren2002, Reference Rydgren2005; Rydgren and Van der Meiden Reference Rydgren and Van der Meiden2019). To illustrate these dynamics, we conduct a chronological and qualitative analysis of SAP and LO newspapers, predominantly aimed at their membership base; internal working documents; and leaders’ speeches. Party and union newspapers in particular offer an excellent forum for observing changes in strategic approaches over time. Their purpose is to be a forum for different viewpoints among members and activists in a manner that is more dynamic and flexible than, say, a party programme or manifesto.
The article makes a two-fold contribution to the study of mainstream political actors and RRPs. First, by appreciating the role of timing. As Anna-Sophie Heinze (Reference Heinze2022) points out, few studies consider the effect of timing on mainstream responses, which are better understood as an evolving process than a series of discrete events (see also Pierson Reference Pierson, Mahoney and Thelen2015). This process includes feedback loops and information-sharing opportunities, where different actors learn from each other and the effects of their past choices. Second, by acknowledging the relevance of the internal arena. This arena is just as important as the external (i.e. parliamentary and/or electoral) contexts (Sjöblom Reference Sjöblom1968), since effective strategies also require intra-organizational cohesion (Little and Farrell Reference Little, Farrell, Scarrow, Webb and Poguntke2017; Rathgeb and Klitgaard Reference Rathgeb and Klitgaard2022).
Regarding the responses of the SAP and LO in the external arena, we find similar response patters as confirmed in other national contexts (see e.g. Bale et al. Reference Bale, Green-Pedersen, Krouwel, Luther and Sitter2010; Heinze Reference Heinze2022; Krause et al. Reference Krause, Cohen and Abou-Chadi2023): first they ignored the SD; then, faced with its entry into parliament in 2010, they sought to minimize the SD’s political impact by defusing its message; and finally, from the mid-2010s onwards (crystallizing during the 2018 election campaign), the labour movement gradually adapted to the changed political environment by partially accommodating the SD’s positions. However, these external responses were preceded by an extended internal process, where the SAP/LO debated their target audiences and political focuses, changed their campaign strategies, and engaged in internal educational efforts, or what we label below as the internal defuse strategy. The aim was to reach internal unity regarding the labour movement’s external responses.
In the next sections, we outline our analytical framework, which builds on the literature regarding the strategic options available to mainstream parties and then adds the trade unions and internal organizational arena to the mix. We then introduce the Swedish case and show how it is an illustrative example of party system de- and realignment, which forced the mainstream left to re-orient itself vis-à-vis challenger parties. After this we discuss our research design and methodology, and finally we present our findings and reflect on their broader relevance to the study of mainstream political actors and RRPs.
Response options for parties and trade unions in the external and internal arenas
Party competition in Western Europe has been challenged by two overlapping phenomena. First, changes in the cleavage structure that underpins party politics have yielded unstable constituencies for the traditional mainstream (see e.g. Häusermann et al. Reference Häusermann, Picot and Geering2013; Heinze Reference Heinze2018; Wenzelburger and Zohlnhöfer Reference Wenzelburger and Zohlnhöfer2021). For Social Democratic parties, the educated, urban and middle-class voters have partially replaced the industrial working class as their core constituency (see further Kurer and Palier Reference Kurer and Palier2019). This means the centre-left has had to develop strategies less rooted in working-class grievances and more relevant for building cross-class coalitions (Bremer and Rennwald Reference Bremer and Rennwald2023; Gingrich and Häusermann Reference Gingrich and Häusermann2015). Second, the rise and establishment of RRPs has fundamentally changed party competition dynamics across Europe and beyond (see e.g. Afonso and Rennwald Reference Afonso, Rennwald, Manow and Palier2018; Demker and Odmalm Reference Demker and Odmalm2022; Kitschelt Reference Kitschelt1994), and the Social Democrats now find themselves partially competing with RRPs over working-class voters (Rennwald Reference Rennwald2020; Rydgren Reference Rydgren2006; Salo and Rydgren Reference Salo and Rydgren2021).
While a large body of literature has studied the relationship between Social Democratic parties and RRPs (Bale et al. Reference Bale, Green-Pedersen, Krouwel, Luther and Sitter2010; Krause et al. Reference Krause, Cohen and Abou-Chadi2023; Loxbo Reference Loxbo2024; Loxbo and Bolin Reference Loxbo and Bolin2016), comparatively fewer contributions have prioritized trade unions, even though the flight of working-class voters to RRPs is bound to affect unions as well. Existing accounts focus on the attitudes and strategies of RRPs towards trade unions (Rathgeb and Klitgaard Reference Rathgeb and Klitgaard2022) and the electoral implications of such strategies (Mosimann et al. Reference Mosimann, Rennwald and Zimmermann2019). Yet studies have also shown that trade unions can act as a shield against far-right mobilization (see e.g. Arndt and Rennwald Reference Arndt and Rennwald2016), which suggests that their strategic responses also matter. Line Rennwald and Nadja Mosimann (Reference Rennwald and Mosimann2023) identify a ‘union effect’, which means trade unions can translate their members’ pro-redistribution preferences into pro-redistribution voting. This translation is enabled by two mechanisms. First, a ‘mobilization effect’, where unions coordinate their members through various campaign efforts; and second, a ‘saliency effect’, where unions communicate pro-redistribution positions to their members, helping them to prioritize between different political issues.
When studying various responses to RRPs below, we see no reason why the options available to political parties should not be available to trade unions as well. Equally, parties may also aim for ‘mobilization’ and ‘saliency’ effects when it comes to strategies oriented towards internal audiences.
Parties’ response options: theoretical expectations
The rise of RRPs challenges both the form and substance of party competition. Regarding form, mainstream parties must reconsider their cooperation patterns, as the growth of RRPs makes building ideologically coherent majorities along the traditional left-right dimension increasingly difficult (see e.g. Heinze Reference Heinze2022; Heinze and Salo Reference Heinze, Salo and Rovira Kaltwasser2024). Substantively, the rise of RRPs has also contributed to increasing the salience of so-called second-dimension issues – notably immigration, but also law and order (e.g. Abou-Chadi and Krause Reference Abou-Chadi and Krause2020) – as well as the ethno-nationalist framing of these issues (Rydgren and Van der Meiden Reference Rydgren and Van der Meiden2019). These developments can and have incentivized mainstream parties to move closer to the RRPs’ position on these issues (see e.g. Abou-Chadi Reference Abou-Chadi2016; Krause et al. Reference Krause, Cohen and Abou-Chadi2023).
Previous studies have tended to view mainstream responses as largely discrete events taking place in the external arena of parliaments, executives and elections (e.g. Bale et al. Reference Bale, Green-Pedersen, Krouwel, Luther and Sitter2010; but see Rathgeb and Wolkenstein Reference Rathgeb and Wolkenstein2021). However, this focus makes two assumptions regarding party behaviour, which we challenge. First, as Strom (Reference Strom1990) puts it, parties tend to be analysed as if they have no history and no future, and their behaviour is thus understood as a set of static episodes. Second, parties are assumed to be unitary and cohesive actors, which their external behaviour then reflects (Little and Farrell Reference Little, Farrell, Scarrow, Webb and Poguntke2017). In reality, though, strategies are likely to be ‘conditioned by past events as well as the anticipation of future events’ (Strom Reference Strom1990: 569). Parties are also not always cohesive organizations but rather filled with different actors that have different opinions and different preferences (Wenzelburger and Zohlnhöfer Reference Wenzelburger and Zohlnhöfer2021). This point is often missing, since studies tend to focus on responses in the external arena at a specific moment in time. This means they do not necessarily appreciate the internal processes that allow an external response to be made in the first place.
We thus conceptualize responses to RRPs as strategies that evolve over time, possibly in quite predictable ways. Strategies are constrained both by external factors (the strategies of competitors, voter behaviour, public opinion, election results) and internal ones (maintaining unity, consideration of past choices, leadership’s position). Moreover, party (and union) actors will try to influence both these environments: externally, with the focus on votes, policy and office (Strom Reference Strom1990); and internally, by aiming to unite members and activists behind the leadership’s position, or what Tim Bale and colleagues (Bale et al. Reference Bale, Green-Pedersen, Krouwel, Luther and Sitter2010, 422) label ‘persuasion’.
Based on the literature, then, we can discern three broad (external) response trajectories: (1) to ignore/hold; (2) to isolate/defuse; and (3) to adapt/accommodate (see further Heinze Reference Heinze2022; Meguid Reference Meguid2005). Initially, the political mainstream will try to maintain the status quo, seeking to prevent the entry of the RRP into the party system by marginalizing it, ignoring both the party and the issues it promotes (Downs Reference Downs2001). Substantively, the mainstream parties will hold on to their own views (Bale et al. Reference Bale, Green-Pedersen, Krouwel, Luther and Sitter2010). In the internal arena, this phase is unlikely to raise much controversy. Instead, organizational leaderships will try to strengthen the internal consensus by communicating the party/union line to their members. This could be conceptualized as an internal holding strategy. Such communication strategies are likely to include delegitimizing messages regarding the RRP, and certainly will not acknowledge any electoral or political competition with it.
Once the RRP has grown large enough to be labelled as a ‘relevant party’ (Sartori Reference Sartori1976), potentially entering parliament (Heinze Reference Heinze2022), the next stage begins of minimizing its political impact. This can involve isolating the RRP behind a firewall, refusing any parliamentary and/or executive cooperation with it. This response often necessitates the formation of (ideologically awkward) ‘grand coalitions’ to keep the firewall intact. In terms of substance, the second stage is characterized by a defuse strategy, ‘resetting’ the political agenda to the RRP’s disadvantage (Bale et al. Reference Bale, Green-Pedersen, Krouwel, Luther and Sitter2010). In practice, it means parties downplay certain issues, such as immigration, while raising the salience of others, such as taxes. In the internal arena, we would expect this stage to involve an acknowledgement of the electoral threat posed by the RRP, and debate on how to counter it. The latter may involve educational efforts aimed at activists and members, seeking a ‘saliency effect’ (Mosimann et al. Reference Mosimann, Rennwald and Zimmermann2019) where parties and unions communicate their preferred issues and positions on them to ‘help members prioritize’. This, in other words, is an internal defuse strategy, aimed at strengthening the internal ideational consensus and avoiding further leaks to the RRP, in a situation where some such leaks are assumed to already have happened.
The third strategic phase involves adaptation to a political environment that is characterized by an electorally strong RRP. This means potentially accommodating its issue positions and accepting parliamentary and/or executive cooperation (although the latter is more likely for ideologically proximate centre-right parties than the centre-left). Adaptation occurs when the political mainstream no longer considers it strategically viable to fully isolate or oppose the RRP. The third phase is likely to cause internal strains for the organization, including debates regarding past and present strategies. This stage also involves internal feedback loops, where actors review past decisions, debate them, and – particularly at the level of leadership – use them to justify the current situation. The pairing of internal–unity and external–cohesion is vital for parties to be successful (e.g. Little and Farrell Reference Little, Farrell, Scarrow, Webb and Poguntke2017), which is why we are likely to see enhanced efforts at reaching such unity by, for example, changing staff and leadership personnel if that helps to justify the changed position vis-à-vis the RRP.
Having laid out our analytical framework, we now discuss the Swedish case, which has seen a steady increase in the vote share of the SD at the expense of the SAP (Figure 1). This is followed by a presentation of our data and methodology, before moving on to the analysis stage.
SAP and the SD Vote Shares in Parliamentary Elections, 1998–2022
The transformation of the Swedish party system and competition over the working-class vote
This paper presents a single-case study of Sweden, which we consider a particularly illuminating example of de- and realignment of the political space around labour movements, RRPs and the working-class vote. The Swedish Social Democratic party is one of the world’s most successful political parties. Between 1948 and 2002, the SAP won on average over 40% of the vote (Aylott and Bolin Reference Aylott and Bolin2007), leading Giovanni Sartori to describe Sweden as a ‘predominant party system’ (Sartori Reference Sartori2005, cited in Aylott and Bolin Reference Aylott and Bolin2015). Sweden has also had an exceptionally high unionization rate, although this has declined from 81% in 2000 to 69% in 2020 (Kjellberg and Nergaard Reference Kjellberg and Nergaard2022). The dominance of the class cleavage led to the structuration of the political space around a single, socio-economic axis, which has long marginalized other divides (Demker and Odmalm Reference Demker and Odmalm2022).
The class cleavage has been carried by two organizations – the SAP and the LO – which still today co-exist in a symbiotic arrangement with ‘multiple durable and reciprocal inter-organizational links (which overall suggest) a high degree of institutionalization and something close to an integrated relationship’ (Jansson Reference Jansson, Allern and Bale2017: 211). This relationship is based on an exchange of resources, whereby the LO supports the SAP through financial resources and by mobilizing its members to vote for the party and in return receives privileged access to political information and power (Aylott and Bolin Reference Aylott and Bolin2007; Jansson Reference Jansson, Allern and Bale2017; Kjellberg and Nergaard Reference Kjellberg and Nergaard2022).
Nonetheless, the SAP/LO relationship has also come under strain, not least because of the weakening link between class, union membership and voting behaviour (Figure 2). Union density has declined, particularly among blue-collar workers, such that in 2020 it was only 61%, compared to 73% among white-collar workers. Also, fewer LO-affiliated workers now vote for the SAP. In the 2022 parliamentary election, for example, 30.2% of LO members voted for the SD, while 39.4% voted for the SAP. In 2010, in contrast, the corresponding values were still over 50% for the SAP and less than 10% for the SD (Olsson Reference Olsson2023). The change has been remarkable, and is bound to have caused internal debate in both organizations regarding the reasons for this development, its implications for SAP/LO strategies, and the mutual institutional arrangement between the two organizations.
Support for the SAP and SD among LO Members, 2010–2022 (%)
The rise of the Sweden Democrats represents an existential threat to the Landsorganisationen i Sverige labour movement, since the latter depends on the primacy of the left-right, socio-economic cleavage (see e.g. Backlund and Jungar Reference Backlund and Jungar2019; Elgenius and Rydgren Reference Elgenius and Rydgren2019, Reference Elgenius, Rydgren, Samers and Rydgren2024). The SD is a value-conservative party that thrives on its ethno-nationalistic and anti-immigration agenda (Jylhä et al. Reference Jylhä, Rydgren and Strimling2019; Rydgren and Van der Meiden Reference Rydgren and Van der Meiden2019). It has long been stigmatized in Swedish politics because of its extremist roots in neo-Nazi milieux, although the current party leader, Jimmie Åkesson, has dedicated his tenure to polishing up the party image (with some success, as the party currently supports a right-wing government). Yet, and in concert with RRPs elsewhere, the SD also sought to challenge the SAP’s role as the labour party in Sweden, encroaching on the SAP’s traditional territories of labour markets and welfare services as well as appropriating traditional social democratic ideas, such as the notion of the folkhem (the people’s home) (Loxbo Reference Loxbo2024). Relatedly, the SD focused more and more on attracting the working-class vote, partly by working within the trade union movement but also by establishing a trade union of its own, the so-called ‘Löntagarna’, which proved unsuccessful, however, and shut down in 2014 (Sjölander Reference Sjölander2023).
It is no exaggeration to say that the SD’s rise has completely transformed the Swedish political scene, which has traditionally revolved around the two blocs, the centre-left and the centre-right. This bipolar system was challenged by the SD’s entry into parliament in 2010, as neither bloc was able to gain a parliamentary majority. With the mainstream parties’ decision initially to isolate the SD behind a strict firewall, its ascendancy effectively led Swedish politics to endorse a minority government model (Hellström and Lindahl Reference Hellström, Lindahl, Bergman, Bäck and Hellström2021).
Data and methodology
We focus on the single case of Sweden for the following reasons. First, we think it elucidates particularly well the dilemmas Social Democratic parties and trade unions face when their constituencies change from being mainly working-class to increasingly middle-class and, at the same time, an RRP seeks to mobilize that working-class constituency. Class voting has been exceptionally strong in Sweden, which is why its demise and partial replacement with socio-cultural politics, and the associated rise of an RRP, are particularly challenging for the Swedish labour movement. Second, because we focus not only on the Social Democratic party but also on the union movement, the strong organizational ties between the SAP and the LO and their symbiotic nature make the SAP/LO bundle an excellent case for studying intra-organizational debates regarding outward-facing strategies.
Finally, Swedish politics resisted the rise of the RRP for a particularly long time, making it most suitable for our analytical focus on the timing and sequencing of responses. While we acknowledge that the party system ultimately followed a similar sequence of events to that observed in other countries – that is, resist/ignore, defuse, accommodate/adopt – it nevertheless took a comparatively long time to get to the accommodation stage, and the politics of getting there was remarkably ideological, making the internal process of negotiating these responses particularly interesting.
Thus, we study the debate regarding the SAP and LO’s responses to the SD using two main sources of data. First, the organizations’ publicly available newspapers to discern the evolution of the debates regarding the SD and how to respond to it. For the SAP, the newspaper is Aktuellt i Politiken (AiP), and for the LO it is Arbetet (previously called LO-Tidningen). Both newspapers have a long history, being established in the 1950s and 1920s, respectively, and are the traditional forums for conducting internal debates in the labour movement. We therefore believe they offer an excellent window into the diversity of viewpoints and how debates evolved over time compared to, say, manifestoes. However, we acknowledge that interviews could bring further depth to the analysis and therefore should be considered as part of the data in any future research on the topic.
Second, we studied a variety of internal working documents produced by the LO and SAP. These documents were mostly post-election analyses, which provide an opportunity to observe the internal feedback loops – moments of internal learning from past strategies. To complement these documents, we looked at so-called educational materials, such as the Alla Kan Göra Något (a report by the LO from 2012), party congress publications from the SAP, speeches by party and union leaders, and a limited number of articles in the general press. We triangulated the data to get a thorough understanding of the internal debates at any given juncture and then analysed how these debates related to the externally oriented strategies of the labour movement. This enabled us to assess the evolving rationale of the leadership responses within these organizations, which were cross pressured by internal and external incentives.
We organize our analysis according to particular critical junctures we observed, largely corresponding to the parliamentary elections during our chosen period of study (2007–2018). During this period, the SD rose from relative obscurity to occupy a central place in the Swedish party system. The party not only won more and more seats in the national parliament, the Riksdag, but also, more importantly, it increased its share of the working-class vote. It was thus a period when the labour movement, and the political establishment as a whole, was forced to respond to the SD’s rise.
The newspaper data stem from a large and original corpus of text (Salo and Rydgren Reference Salo and Rydgren2021), covering the period between 2007 and 2018. We searched the media database Mediearkivet for any mentions of the SD in the two newspapers using variations of the keyword ‘Sverigedemokraterna’, and manually eliminated any irrelevant hits (e.g. when the SD was mentioned as part of a list of election results). Finally, we read through all the articles where the SD was mentioned as a party and/or that discussed its politics. From this dataset, we purposively selected articles in an iterative process. In our original analysis (2021), we were only concerned with external strategies. Yet in the process of studying these strategies and the accompanying debates, we found there was also a parallel debate taking place internally. For this article, then, we have chosen articles from the data corpus to illustrate the theoretical claim that as part of their response to RRPs, parties and unions develop internal strategies directed at their members as well, and that these evolve over time due to the internal feedback loops. In addition, we gathered some new data from the party and general press to shed light on the post-2018 period.
The purpose of the quotes we use in the next section is to illustrate the key considerations and motivations behind the external and internal response strategies at the given crucial juncture, each of which was selected after a careful and considered reading of the data.
Discussion of the findings
From ignoring to (moral) condemnation (2006–2010)
In the 2006 election, the first signs of the SAP losing its ‘dominant’ status began to appear. Although the party obtained 35% of the vote, it was still its worst election result since the 1920s. During the election campaign – and at a time of rising unemployment – the SAP lost ownership of its core issues – namely, jobs and employment – to the centre-right Moderates, which had reinvented itself as ‘the new workers’ party’ (Aylott and Bolin Reference Aylott and Bolin2007). The post-election analysis showed that losses were concentrated amongst the urban and educated middle class, and the SAP consequently decided to engage in ‘the battle over the middle class’ and make this a priority (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2006: 103). However, the party’s analysis did not identify any significant defections by working-class voters, since these were believed to share a close ‘values-based affinity’ with the party (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2006: 99). Moreover, the centre-right bloc, the Alliance, won the election and formed a government coalition led by the Moderates. The coalition had largely captured the urban and liberal centre-right, leaving the market-interventionist, authoritarian and nationalist corner of the political quadrant free for the SD to monopolize (Lipset Reference Lipset1959; Oscarsson Reference Oscarsson2021). The results of the 2006 election thus created an important change in the opportunity structure, which allowed the SD to advance among value-conservative and working-class voters.
The period between 2006 and 2010 was the first time the political mainstream, including the labour movement, perceived that the SD posed a serious threat and that they therefore needed to respond. In 2007, Dagens Arbete, a newspaper representing industrial workers, published a survey according to which 8.2% of young industrial workers said they would consider voting for the SD (Dagens Arbete 2007). The strategy of the labour movement had so far been to fully ignore the SD, but the survey prompted both the SAP and LO to reconsider their approaches. ‘One topic that can no longer be avoided is that of the SD’, opined the party newspaper in April 2007, ‘[and we] must learn more about this party and then have that debate’ (Aktuellt i Politiken 2007a, emphasis added).
Acknowledging that the labour movement had to have that debate consequently marked the end of the ignore strategy. Yet this did not mean the door to the party system was open. Because of the SD’s extremist legacy, the party was still considered a pariah. There was therefore significant internal opposition to the SAP’s party leader, Mona Sahlin, deciding to engage in a televised debate with the SD leader, Jimmie Åkesson, in April 2007. Sahlin qualified her decision as a way of defending democracy and ‘cleansing’ it from unwanted ingredients: ‘[…] I’m prepared to have the debate. We can’t avoid the democratic clean-up work anymore’ (Aktuellt i Politiken 2007a).
The debate within the SAP and LO at the time centred around values and principles, not political issues. However, it was acknowledged that ‘[…] the labour movement will always stand up for equal rights. And basing our policies on openness and welcoming the knowledge and dynamism people from other cultures and countries bring, is also very practical’. Likewise, ‘[t]he labour movement must engage respectfully with the Sweden Democrats as well as their voters, which means having serious discussions about very difficult issues […] unemployment, housing segregation, etc.’ (Aktuellt i Politiken 2007b). The labour movement reiterated its core outward message when the LO leader, Wanja Lundby-Wedin, said ‘[w]e do not accept any political forces that do not respect equal rights and the equal value of all people’; and ‘[the SD] is […] a xenophobic and racist party’ (Aktuellt i Politiken 2009). Engaging in a highly normative and values-based discourse was arguably also an example of an externally and internally oriented holding-strategy. That is, reiterating the core values of the labour movement in order to strengthen the level of internal cohesion around what the labour movement was all about.
Isolation and values-based defuse strategies (2010–2014)
‘The election result was a disaster’, commented Lundby-Wedin, when the SD gained parliamentary representation in the 2010 election, ‘and not just for the labour movement, but also Sweden’ (Wreder Reference Wreder2010). The SD obtained 5.7% of the vote and 20 seats, whereas the SAP (30.7%) and the Moderates (30.1%) almost tied. This election marked the beginning of the second stage regarding the evolving strategies towards the SD. In order to minimize its political impact, the mainstream parties decided to isolate the SD behind a cordon sanitaire. The election result produced two blocs on the left and right, roughly equal in size, neither of which had a majority, as well as a third, standalone bloc consisting of the SD, with which no party would cooperate. The centre-right Alliance, led by the Moderates, continued to govern, but as a minority with the centre-left bloc in opposition.
For the labour movement, it was a moment of reckoning and a period in which the internally oriented strategies dominated its responses. In the 2010 election, ‘8.8% of LO-affiliated male workers voted for the SD’, which was described as a ‘big problem’ for the labour movement, according to Lundby-Wedin (Aktuellt i Politiken 2010b). There were, however, few signs of any externally directed strategies regarding the substantive political engagement with the SD. Instead, with regards to the SAP, the main strategy centred on tweaking parliamentary politics in order to minimize the political impact of the SD (Göteborgs-Posten 2010). Internally, the response by the SAP leadership was to commission a ‘Crisis Commission’, which engaged in an election post-mortem (Aktuellt i Politiken 2010a).
The Commission found that jobs and employment were the most important questions for LO-affiliated voters, but also that ownership of these issues had been taken over by the centre-right Alliance prior to the election (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2010: 21–22). The Commission recommended that the labour movement engage with the SD and criticize it on an ‘issue by issue basis’ instead of focusing on the ‘political game’ (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2010: 44). There was an apparent discrepancy therefore between the LO and SAP’s values-based discourse towards the SD and the Commission’s suggestions of engaging with the SD. After the election, Lundby-Wedin argued it was important that politics should not ‘just be about issues’, and that the labour movement had to show it was a ‘popular movement aiming for solidarity and equality […]. If we can demonstrate our fundamental values, it will inspire confidence in those who share them’ (Aktuellt i Politiken 2010b, emphasis added).
The LO proclaimed it would ‘fight’ the SD (Expressen 2010) using a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, by reaching out to people in general and ‘discuss[ing]’ politics ‘wherever it comes up’ (Expressen 2010); and on the other, by ‘showing there are politicians who listen to all the workers in Sweden’ (Aktuellt i Politiken 2010b). This was a first indication of the strategic reorientation away from pursuing the middle-class vote and returning the labour movement to its working-class roots. For the SAP, this ‘new’ direction was reflected in a leadership change, replacing the ‘middle-class’ Mona Sahlin first with Håkan Juholt, and then with the career trade unionist and head of the Metal Workers’ Union, Stefan Löfven. The LO, on the other hand, responded by ‘educating’ its members (Expressen 2010). LO’s main effort to this end was to initiate a campaign entitled ‘Alla kan göra något – allas lika värde och lika rätt’ (Everybody is able to do something – everybody’s equal value and equal rights) (Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO) 2012), which was an anti-racist educational programme that all LO-affiliated personnel had to undertake.
The organized labour movement (Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO) 2012) also published a related pamphlet arguing the SD was not a worker-friendly party: ‘The right-wing populist parties may sound like they’re the new party for workers […] But the basic nationalist principle is we are all subordinate to the interest of the nation. This means that these parties have traditionally sided with the employer and they reject the idea that class struggle is a driving force for improvement’ (Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO) 2012: 27). This statement was arguably an attempt to achieve the ‘saliency effect’ (Rennwald and Mosimann Reference Rennwald and Mosimann2023) and re-order the membership’s preferences to realign with the left-right way of framing political conflict, which has always been vital to the labour movement. Conceptualized differently, these efforts were part of an internal defuse strategy, which no longer simply reiterated the core values of the labour movement (as in the holding strategy), but sought to re-set the agenda (for members and activists) when it became clear the SD was encroaching on the labour movement’s territory.
The issue of how to deal with SD-sympathizing LO members was deeply divisive. Some unions, such as those for transport and paper workers, took a hardline approach and excluded members who were also active SD-supporters, while others prevented SD-supporters from standing as elected officials. This, together with the top-down educational efforts, caused further controversy and resistance in LO-dominated workplaces: ‘The union movement uses terms such as human dignity to denigrate opposing views [… and] to educate our members on issues of racism and xenophobia is not only patronizing but also highly disrespectful’ concluded a former LO member, who left because of the union’s alleged intolerance of diverse opinions (Kåks Röshammar Reference Kåks Röshammar2013a, see also Reference Kåks Röshammar2013b).
Issue-based engagement and reconsideration of past strategies (2014–2018)
The period between 2014 and 2018 was decisive for the transformation of the Swedish political landscape. Key external events were the migration crisis of 2015–2016, as well as the increase in organized crime and street violence, which together pushed up the salience of immigration and law-and-order issues. Yet the SD had begun to grow substantially even before these events, strengthening its support especially among manual workers (see Figures 1 and 2). In the 2014 election, the SD more than doubled in size (gaining 12.9%) while the SAP increased slightly to 31%, which allowed it to assume office as a minority coalition together with the Greens. Although the political mainstream continued to isolate the RRP behind a firewall, this was also a period when the SD’s influence on the form as well as the substance of Swedish politics was becoming evident.
Evidence of the former materialized in December 2014 when the SD leveraged its swing position and voted in favour of the opposition’s budget. As the government could not continue without a budget, Prime Minister Löfven announced a snap election. However, this election was said by mainstream parties to only benefit the SD. Consequently, they resolved the deadlock by making a six-party deal known as the ‘December Agreement’, and they effectively agreed to let the larger of the two blocs rule without a parliamentary majority. This was done with the sole purpose of preventing the SD from having any political influence.
Substance-wise, there was a shift in strategy away from ‘values’ over to ‘issues’. This change was prompted by internal and external considerations alike. Internally, the SAP dropped its priority to capture the middle-class vote (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2006: 13) and refocused on ‘[y]oung men in rural areas […] who believe rising unemployment and welfare cuts have made their lives worse in recent years’ (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2014: 34). Demand for such a reorientation towards working-class grievances was highlighted extensively in the internal debates, particularly from the side of the LO: ‘most people we talk to at the workplace feel that they have been forgotten and betrayed by “their” party […] the labour party must listen to people’s worries […] Don’t ever forget who built the Social Democratic party in the first place! […] In campaigns you want us. Before elections you want us. We are beginning to wonder, when will we get something back?’ (Nilsson and Ljungdahl Reference Nilsson and Ljungdahl2015).
To better accommodate the ‘forgotten worker in the countryside’, the LO decided to continue its educational efforts and went for a mix of internal holding and defusing strategies, which aimed to strengthen the consensus on core political messages. It began a campaign aimed at its membership base emphasizing the anti-labour stance of the SD (Klepke, Reference Klepke2014), and also launched a so-called Equality Inquiry among the communities of the Swedish industrial heartland (Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO) 2015).
The SAP, conversely, revisited its policy positions on immigration and law-and-order. This was partially prompted by the external event of the refugee crisis, when over 162,000 migrants sought asylum in Sweden in 2015 alone, as well as the increased activity of organized crime. The shift was also driven by the labour movement’s internal analysis, which showed that immigration had been a key issue in the election for LO-affiliated voters in particular (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2014: 41), and that there was widespread xenophobia among them: ‘Issues of immigration and integration tended to dominate discussions during our visits [and] xenophobic attitudes and comments were constant […] at least in the male-dominated workplaces’ (Arena Idé 2014: 17). The SAP chose to downplay immigration and integration in the election campaign (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2014: 60), which was also consistent with the defuse strategy it had adopted since 2010.
Yet the party was also perceived to lack a clear stance on these issues. Indeed, in the 2013 Party Congress, (future party leader and prime minister) Magdalena Andersson stated that the ‘[…] current integration policy has reached the end of the road. It takes too long for people to become self-sufficient and a part of Swedish society. The idea of pursuing integration that is separate from employment and welfare is outdated’ (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2013: 81). Immigration was thus a divisive issue, and its increased level of salience from 2014 onwards served to revive ‘latent internal conflicts on immigration policy’ in the party (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2018: 40). Consequently, the SAP was forced to take a stance on the 2015–2016 refugee crisis and deal with its fallout, not least because it was the major party in government.
This intra-party conflict crystallized as the SAP-led government introduced stricter border controls in late 2015 and then began working on a cross-party ‘Migration Pact’, which aimed to make Swedish legislation comparable to international conventions and EU law. In January 2016, Sweden unilaterally introduced temporary controls at the Danish border in a considerable U-turn, which was deeply controversial within the red-green coalition government: ‘I have not met a single party member […] who thinks any of these policies are any good. People feel betrayed, that’s tough’, said SAP’s local leader in Stockholm, Veronica Palm (Persson Reference Persson2015).
The SAP leadership justified its decisions in two ways. First, by blaming the uneven situation of burden-sharing within the EU (Löfven Reference Löfven2015), and second, by making a distinction between the SAP-in-office and the SAP-on-the-ground. Party Secretary Carin Jämtin even admitted that the government’s policies ran against the official position of the SAP, which had allegedly remained unchanged: ‘We have, many, many times, been forced to make decisions that run contrary to the guidelines established at the Party Congress’ (Persson Reference Persson2015). She then underlined that it was the government, and not the party, that had made these decisions, and that the SAP’s party line remained unchanged: ‘My assessment is the party is not going to change its position on the issue of immigration’ (Persson Reference Persson2015).
The SAP was moving towards the SD’s immigration policy position in what appears a clear case of an adopt strategy. Yet it is important to note that this shift also had additional drivers, such as the internal strategic reconsideration and the multiple pressures parties face once they assume office. Moreover, the SAP – and the LO – had traditionally advocated stricter rather than liberal immigration policies, particularly in terms of labour migration (Bucken-Knapp et al. Reference Bucken-Knapp, Hinnfors, Spehar and Levin2014; Hinnfors et al. Reference Hinnfors, Spehar and Bucken-Knapp2012). Indeed, as Jonas Hinnfors et al. (2012: 589–590) suggest, Swedish social democracy has distinctively ‘national ideological roots’ in a way that makes its ideology entirely compatible with restrictive immigration policies. Hence, the party’s restrictive turn of 2015–2016 was not as unprecedented as it may appear.
The combination of immigration’s very high levels of salience and the labour movement’s new focus on the ‘forgotten worker with potentially xenophobic attitudes’ meant that both the SAP and LO saw the SD as their main opponent going into the 2018 election. As the LO newspaper Arbetet had earlier concluded, the problem for the SAP was that its traditional voters ‘have working-class jobs and are members of the LO, yet they still vote for the SD. They are the labour movement’s biggest challenge today’ (Palm and Frisk Reference Palm and Frisk2017). In a similar vein, LO leader Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson stated that ‘LO members essentially have two choices, either the SAP or the SD’ (Martos Nilsson Reference Martos Nilsson2018).
Adaptation and cross-bloc cooperation (2018–2022)
In the 2018 election the SAP identified the Moderates and the SD as its main adversaries (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2018: 37) since there was a sense of a pact developing between the two that could develop into a new formalized right-wing bloc against the SAP (Löfven Reference Löfven2018). The SAP campaigned as an alternative to this bloc and emphasized that ‘[t]he Social Democrats are the only guarantee for a government where the Sweden Democrats have no power’ (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2018: 37).
Issue-wise, the SAP selected two strategies, emphasizing both welfare, which targeted Moderate-leaning voters, and immigration and law-and-order, targeting SD-leaning voters (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2018: 36). The SAP’s harsher tone regarding the latter set of issues was remarkable, as acknowledged by the SAP’s campaign manager, John Sanchi, when announcing the election campaign: ‘we have a political agenda today that in some ways is very authoritarian’ (Eriksson Reference Eriksson2018). Instead of defusing the issues of immigration and law-and-order, the SAP was now playing up its achievements in these areas: ‘We’ve tightened up the “unsustainable” immigration policy and greatly increased the police and defence budgets’ (Söderström Reference Söderström2018).
The SAP campaign of 2018 marked a decisive shift to a strategy of adaptation to new political circumstances characterized by an expanding RRP and high levels of salience of crime and immigration issues. In the campaign, the SAP did not challenge the SD regarding immigration (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2018: 37), but rather tried to keep or win back SD-prone voters by pushing (further) restrictions on labour migration and harder sentences for gang-related crimes (Frisk Reference Frisk2018; Martinsson Reference Martinsson2018; Wreder Reference Wreder2018). While the SAP’s strategy of ignoring/holding was premised on defending democracy by not talking about the SD’s preferred issues, the party was now claiming that ‘voters want someone to take control, [and] elections should be about the issues that voters think are important. That is the core of democracy’ (Eriksson Reference Eriksson2018, emphasis added).
The LO leadership backed the SAP’s campaign themes, although it insisted that welfare was its first priority (Frisk Reference Frisk2018). This expressed consensus at the leadership level masked underlying differences, however. There was disappointment about the heavy emphasis on law-and-order issues (Sima Reference Sima2018) and demands were raised to return to a defuse strategy by framing law-and-order as a question of redistribution (Lindberg Reference Lindberg2018). The LO’s main campaign effort was expressed through an attempt to ‘talk to’ 500,000 of its members via a telephone campaign. This more horizontal strategy could be seen as a response to earlier criticisms within the union of the top-down anti-racism education campaign.
Despite these efforts, the SAP had its worst-ever result in the September 2018 election. With 28.3% of the vote, the party lost 13 seats, whereas the SD gained 13 seats with a 17.5% share of the vote and became the third largest party in the Riksdag. Less than half the LO voters (41%) opted for the SAP, and almost a quarter of them went for the SD. The SAP’s post-election analysis blamed the government for ‘failing to pursue a straightforward, clear and sufficiently strict immigration policy in line with the demands of a majority of the electorate’ (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2018: 40). Echoing the intra-party splits during the migration crisis, the analysis further pointed out that the ‘reversal on immigration was not properly anchored within the party membership’ and that any policy changes ‘should have been discussed earlier within the party and with its members’ (Socialdemokraterna (SAP) 2018: 40).
The LO’s analysis similarly highlighted immigration as a key factor, but from the point of view of ‘social cohesion’ and underfunded public services, especially in areas with a growing migrant population: ‘Breaking patterns of segregation and combating discrimination should be higher up on the agenda […] The quality of the welfare services needs to be maintained as the population grows’ (Engström Reference Engström2018). The analysis further underlined that past strategies focusing on the urban middle-class had ‘undermined support among the party’s traditional working-class constituencies’ and the policy platforms that were ‘clearly based on the everyday life of a trade union member’ (Engström Reference Engström2018).
After the 2018 election, neither of the traditional blocs managed to achieve a majority. The centre-right Alliance essentially fell apart over the question of how to deal with the SD. The Centre and Liberal parties wanted to continue with the isolation strategy, whereas the Moderates and Christian Democrats became increasingly ambivalent. In a historic move, then, the SAP negotiated a cross-bloc government deal in early 2019, known as the ‘January Agreement’, with the Greens as a junior coalition partner and the former Alliance members, the Liberals and Centre, acting as support parties. The deal was deeply controversial for the labour movement and resulted in a public display of disagreement between the LO and the SAP. The LO leadership criticized the deal for increasing inequality and weakening labour market standards and for not being ‘Social Democratic politics’ (Aftonbladet Reference Aftonbladet2019). The goal of the deal was to continue isolating the SD and minimize its political impact, but the result was instead increased tensions in the relationship between the SAP and the LO, including a massive fall in the LO’s monetary contributions to the SAP (Frisk Reference Frisk2021) and further alienation of some LO-affiliated voters who were potentially pushed towards the SD.
Conclusion
In this article, we have sought to expand the conventional lens of looking at mainstream responses to the far-right challenger by bringing the intra-organizational arena into the equation. We suggest therefore that any external response is also accompanied by an internal process. Accordingly, the subsequent choice of appropriate response is preceded by a series of events that are justified, at the very least, to an internal audience, and at most, negotiated with said audience. To demonstrate this relationship, we investigated not only the intra-political arena within the organized Swedish labour movement, the SAP, but also that within its economic wing, the LO.
Our analysis shows that the two organizations did not merely respond to the SD’s electoral rise or political agenda but were also sensitive to their own internal analysis of past choices and strategies. Thus, the internal arena was situated between the organizations’ leadership structure and the membership base, thereby forming a nexus where the organizations had to balance conflicting demands stemming from the top as well as the bottom. Hence, it is in the black box of organizational behaviour where pressures from the external environment – be that the shop floor, party system or international context – meet internal constraints, such as activists’ preferences and the legacies of tradition and past choices.
Moreover, we have shed light on how different types of interactions in the internal arena help shape the subsequent responses of the organized labour movement to the RRP. We also highlighted the importance of appreciating the temporal dimension of party-organizational politics. If we only consider these events as output snapshots, then arguably we would miss important aspects of what motivated these outputs in the first place. We therefore argue that responses to RRPs should be understood as an evolving process rather than a series of discrete events. Future research should pay more attention to such processes, possibly through process-tracing techniques, to identify those factors which help mainstream responses to RRPs succeed. In our view, the construction of internal cohesion is one such factor.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Government and Opposition for their constructive and thorough feedback and work on this article.
Financial support
The authors would like to thank the Swedish Research Council (grant number VR2021-02321); the Research Council of Finland (grant number 326168) and the Strategic Research Council within the Research Council of Finland (grant numbers 365659 and 365708) for financial support.
Disclosure statement
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
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