Straight to the point

The past week of Swedish politics has been a mysterious case of a dog that should have barked, but then simply didn’t. In a barely covered press release, the Riksbanken — Sweden’s central bank — announced that it had lost some 44 billion kr (£3.2 billion), and needed that much money from the state in order to return to the minimal level of capitalisation stipulated by the law. For a small country such as Sweden, this is a very large sum: it represents fully half of what the state spent on defence during the 2023 fiscal year.

The reasons for this new hole in the budget aren’t particularly unique: like every other country in the West, Sweden got too used to zero-interest policies being the new normal, and only belatedly caught up with the new reality brought about by post-Covid interest hikes. The central bank thus engaged in a game of buying high and selling low: loading up on bonds at a point where interest rates were low, and then offloading them when the rates shot up and the economy began taking a turn for the worse.

If one wanted to damn the central bank with some very faint praise, one could at least say that they’re hardly alone in this predicament: the UK is suffering from very similar problems, and much of Europe is stuck in a very deep economic malaise. Yet that doesn’t really change the facts on the ground: the Swedish state, which intended to boost defence spending in order to counter the threat from Russia, now finds that it no longer has the required cash in the bank. Thus, a time of very hard choices is approaching: either the Government must abandon the idea of these defence investments (many of which are strictly necessary just to compensate for what has already been given up on behalf of Ukraine), or engage in some very painful and very unpopular austerity elsewhere.

One might think that a budgetary disaster like this would receive a lot of coverage, but that would be quite wrong. Instead, the public debate in Sweden in recent days has been consumed by a very different story, one that, when taken together with the depressing news from the Riksbanken, lends an air of growing absurdity to the state of politics in both Sweden and Europe as a whole.

At the centre of this recent drama is a controversial law intended to make it easier to change gender. In theory, this should be a boringly familiar culture-war story, a tale of woke politics squaring off against supposedly narrow-minded conservatives. But reality is sometimes much stranger than fiction: Sweden today is governed by the Right, not the Left, and it is the Moderate party that is implicated in pushing this law through. The prime minister of Sweden — Ulf Kristersson — is thus leading the effort to lower the age at which one can change one’s legal gender from 18 to 16, even as a massive supermajority of his own voting base are against this change. To further inflame things, his parliamentary group is also opposed to it, although it is being whipped to vote in favour. And to top it all off, some of the law’s fiercer criticism is coming from the Left, where there are deep concerns about its promises to make it easier to access irreversible surgery.

The Swedish Right, in other words, is busy instituting a Left-leaning reform that some significant parts of the Left do not want, over the stringent objections of many politicians on the Right, and in total contravention of the desires of voters on the Right. Confusion thus abounds: why would the Moderates spend all this energy on an issue that only promises to make their own voters feel dismayed?

If one takes a step back, it becomes clear that this sort of political circus fits into a wider, pan-European pattern. Though the disaster at the Riksbanken and the Kafkaesque process to force through a law nobody really wants may seem to be completely separate issues, they are better understood as two sides of the same coin. As a politician, it’s easy to think that your job is first and foremost to be seen doing something, almost regardless of whatever that “something” ends up being.

Here we can again look to Europe-at-large: outside of the political establishment, the war on farmers in the Netherlands and in Germany clearly has very few friends and very many bitter enemies, yet it keeps going. In France and the UK, politicians are now beating on the drums of mass mobilisation and a return to total industrial warfare, even as the polls show that few are interested. Rather than channelling the will of the electorate, the new job of an increasing number of politicians seems to be going in precisely the opposite direction of what most people desire. Giving people what they want, these politicians seem to say, is a sign of weakness. It is a capitulation to “populism”; doing the opposite of what the people who put you in office want, conversely, is seen displaying the strength or “bravery” needed to stand up to the putative mob.

In a twisted sort of way, the logic makes sense. As the actual room to manoeuvre shrinks and shrinks — as deindustrialisation and the blowback from economic sanctions on Russia sets in — there’s progressively fewer popular things that politicians can actually do. Europe’s leaders have clearly put themselves in an almost impossible situation, promising total victory in Ukraine, economic defeat for Russia, and even the economic ring-fencing and isolation of China. These projects are now falling apart, and the fallout from those failures is gradually being felt. Even before the full-scale war in Ukraine, before the Covid pandemic, the European Monetary Union was clearly limping; Germany’s industrial model was slowly succumbing to its internal contradictions, and the EU project itself was stalling politically and economically. As far back as 2015, the EU’s only “solution” to the sort of economic stagnation seen in Italy was to kick the can down the road. Now, it seems, we are quickly running out of road.

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The poetic genius of Truth Social

By Malcom Kyeyune

Here, one is reminded of the French historian Jacques Barzun, who published what is probably his greatest work, From Dawn to Decadence, at the ripe age of 93. In our times, it is common to use the word “decadent” as a slur or a moral judgement, but Barzun himself famously took a much more nuanced view:

“All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off’. It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance… Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”

In the case of the Swedish Moderates, it seems that Barzun’s vision of “decadence” has now truly set in. They are far from lacking in energy; in fact, they seem constantly, frantically busy, doing things they themselves do not understand and do not want. The horizon of possibility seems to have closed, and only bad options remain: they can either renege on their promises to deliver a robust defence, or they can opt to fulfil those promises through ruthless austerity measures guaranteed to be incredibly toxic to the electorate.

The result of this is a sort of hypertrophy; a politics emptied of all sense and meaning. The Moderates are not alone in this, however; one only needs to cast a glance at the battles between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer to find an even more egregious case of a political class completely divorced from its own electorate. And so we find ourselves in a peculiar situation: a world where popularity and respect look increasingly unattainable for Western politicians, and where unpopularity and anger will soon become the only real yardstick left to measure success. Sure, you might end up doing something nobody asked you to do and nobody wants you to do — but at least you’re still doing something.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/