User:MartinZ/December Agreement

The December Agreement (often abbreviated DÖ) was an agreement between six of the Swedish parliament's eight parties and a result of the 2014 Swedish government crisis. The intention was to exclude the Sweden Democrats from influence by the governing parties and the largest political opposition, the Alliance, agreed the largest party constellation would be released as prime minister and that minority governments were guaranteed to get their budget through.

The December Agreement was reached on 27 December 2014 and was intended to apply until the 2022 general election (almost 8 years), but was formally dissolved as early as 9 October 2015, just over nine months after it was reached, after the Christian Democrats' party conference voted to leave it.

Despite its formal dissolution, it continued to apply in practice; even after the agreement had fallen, the Alliance continued to tolerate the policy of the red-greens. And despite the fact that 6 out of 10 voters in the 2014 general election had voted to the right of the red-greens, the Left Party gained a significant influence over government policy.

The Budgetpromenaden 23 oktober 2014 ahead of Minister of Finance Magdalena Anderssons's submission of the newly appointed government's first budget bill to the Riksdag.

Backround

The Alliance had long wanted a promise from the Social Democrats to always pass the largest bloc so that Sweden could be governed and so that the Sweden Democrats could be isolated. The Social Democrats and Stefan Löfven opposed the principles when they believed that it would cement the bloc policy, keep the Alliance together and make cooperation more difficult across the bloc border.

However, the Alliance voluntarily followed this principle in 2014 when a prime minister was to be appointed, when the four Alliance parties and the Left Party abstained and thus elected Löfven (132 yes, 49 no and 154 blank).

Budget vote

Outside Rosenbad, ahead of the Prime Minister's crisis meeting with leaders of the alliance parties on the evening of 2 December 2014.

Traditionally, each party or coalition in the Riksdag only votes on its own budget proposal and then abstains its votes, which means that the largest alternative's budget wins. To follow this practice, the Sweden Democrats wanted talks with the Social Democrats and proposed, among other things, that asylum and relative immigration should be reduced by 50%, talks that the Social Democrats declined. The Sweden Democrats then announced before the vote that they intended to "try to overthrow every government and budget bill that provides support for increased immigration".

On 3 December 2014, the Sweden Democrats voted on the Alliance's budget after their own budget had been voted down in an earlier round, which triggered the 2014 Swedish government crisis. This meant that the Alliance's budget gained a majority over the Löfven cabinet's first budget and Sweden was therefore governmed in spring 2015 by a red-green government (S, Mp) with an Alliance budget (M, C, Fp and Kd).

Any incumbent government would find it difficult to govern the country if it could not agree on the budget across the bloc borders or with the Sweden Democrats. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven had already before the vote made the budget a cabinet issue, and announced immediately after the vote that on 29 December of that year he intended to call a snap election, an election which would have been held on 22 March 2015. Sweden had not held a snap election since 1958.

The December Agreement was reached to avoid extra elections and similar situations in the future.

The agreement

At a press conference on December 27, 2014, the leaders of the governing parties (the Social Democrats and the Green Party) and the opposition parties in the Alliance (the Moderates, Center Party, People's Party, and Christian Democrats) that an agreement had been reached, which the parties called the December Agreement. The aim of the agreement was to enable minority governments to govern the country according to their own budget proposal, but that they still have to make agreements with other parties on other issues. The two parliamentary parties, the Left Party and the Sweden Democrats, were outside the agreement. Stefan Löfven also announced during the press conference that the government had canceled the plans to announce a snap election due to this agreement. Thus, the government crisis was over.

Never before had such a comprehensive settlement been reached with such urgency. A few negotiators from the party leaderships had secretly agreed in the days before Christmas on how Sweden would be governed for the next eight years.

Göran Hägglund, who was party leader for the Christian Democrats, and Magdalena Andersson, Social Democratic Minister of Finance, were key people in the first contacts.

Contents of the agreement

The parties to the agreement decided to keep the agreement until election day 2022. The agreement entailed the following:

• The prime ministerial candidate who collects support from the party constellation that is larger than all other possible government constellations must be elected.
• A minority government must be able to get its budget through.
• Breaks from the budget should not be possible.
• The agreement identifies three policy areas (defense and security, pensions, energy) for cooperation and dialogue.

The agreement came into force with the vote for the spring bill 2015, which meant that the Alliance's autumn budget applied for 2015 and that the Löfven government was not given the opportunity to raise income taxes in 2015. However, the possibility of raising employer contributions for young people remained from mid-July.

The agreement did not involve any changes to the law, but was a new practice that the six parties agreed to apply.

In practice, the agreement meant that the alliance parties did not lay a common shadow budget, but laid each one separately. This meant that there was no opposition budget that the Sweden Democrats could vote for. The red-green parties have traditionally each set their own shadow budgets.

Criticism

On the same day, the lead writers Peter Wolodarski (Dagens Nyheter) and Anders Lindberg (Aftonbladet) expressed that the agreement was a good decision for Sweden, while Jan Sjunnesson (Samtiden) said that Stefan Löfven was the winner in the short term and the Sweden Democrats in the long term. Tove Lifvendahl (Svenska Dagbladet) was critical and wrote partly that the agreement cemented the bloc politics and partly that it was democratically problematic because democracy's safety valve is its opposition. She said that the possible consequences of the agreement were of such dignity that voters should have had a say in the changed democratic rules of the game.

Criticism of the agreement's principles, design and origins has come from mainly representatives of the bourgeois parties. Something that has been frequently criticized regarding the agreement has been that it is considered undemocratic as party constellations in the minority according to the new principles can get through parliamentary decisions without their own majority. The former moderate Minister of Defense Mikael Odenberg considered the agreement to be "a defeat for democracy and parliamentarism" on the grounds that it significantly transfers power from the Riksdag to the government. Members of the Sweden Democrats, a party that was not part of the agreement, have also criticized the pact. Among other things, Roger Richtoff, chairman of the party in Södermanland, considered that "[The agreement's] main [motivation] is to exclude the Sweden Democrats, which is the third largest party".

On January 13, Aftonbladet wrote in an article that several moderate members of parliament, in which Finn Bengtsson and Isabella Hökmark were quoted, opened up to go against the party board and vote down the government budget in a future vote. According to the party members surveyed, the process that led to the agreement had "been without anchoring in the party" and they also believed that the party had a responsibility to reach a consensus in the parliamentary group. The Moderates' party chairman Anna Kinberg Batra commented on the dissatisfaction in the same article by clarifying that "the agreement has broad support in both the party and the parliamentary group". When asked in Agenda in March 2017 why she agreed to the agreement, Kinberg Batra replied "It was concluded before I took over as party leader so it was as it was with that matter and it was concluded in a very complicated situation in Swedish politics." In practice, however, Kinberg Batra has had the role of party leader ever since the election loss in September 2014.

One of the most outspoken critics of the agreement was the moderate Member of Parliament Finn Bengtsson, who said that he "could not accept such a party whip" because the agreement had not been anchored in the parliamentary group. Bengtsson told in an interview how the December Agreement was announced to the moderate members of parliament after the announcement in the media through a listening telephone conference one hour after it was already ready and public. When the agreement was first tested in practice in the budget vote in the spring of 2015, Bengtsson chose to vote together with party colleague Anders Hansson on the Alliance's budget proposal, which went against the party leadership's decision. Anders Hansson expressed early criticism of both content and origin and called the settlement "a hasty solution to a situation that has arisen". In April 2015, at the County Administrative Meeting for the Moderates in Östergötland, Finn Bengsson won the motion to withdraw from the agreement. The result was unexpected and very unwelcome for the party leadership, but the Moderates' party secretary Tomas Tobé said that this was the only one of ten affected county council meetings that expressed this and that he believed that there was still broad support. Bengsson described how he felt isolated from the moderate parliamentary group, that the party colleagues did not greet him or looked down.

Even within the Christian Democrats, dissatisfaction with the agreement was aroused early on. In March 2015, MEP Lars Adaktusson wrote on SvD Brännpunkt that the new party leadership would not be bound by the agreement. Sara Skyttedal also expressed criticism on social media on the same day as the agreement was announced and the youth organization took a position in the spring that they wanted to tear up the agreement.

Experts drew different conclusions: Political scientist Leif Lewin said that the agreement in the choice between several bad alternatives was the least bad. Political scientist Tommy Möller said that it was contrary to the basic parliamentary principle that the government must have the support of the Riksdag. He also said that the Riksdag had made itself obsolete in the important issue of economic policy, a serious departure from the basic parliamentary idea. That the opposition debated in a sharp tone against the government despite not being prepared to stop economic policy, he called "playing political air guitar".

Immediately after the agreement was concluded, Sifo conducted a survey which showed that 56 percent thought it was right to enter into the agreement and only half as many, 28 percent, thought it was wrong. In September 2015, public opinion had reversed, as 48 percent of the voters surveyed thought it was wrong to enter into the December Agreement and only 30 percent thought it was right. Among the parties to the agreement, the confidence of the Christian Democratic voters was lowest.

Dissolution

In the autumn of 2015, the four bourgeois parties held congresses that would deal with motions on the December Agreement. First out was the Center Party's party meeting on September 24-27, where they stated that the party would be behind the agreement.

"Där står den och längtar till fredag.
Hejdå decemberöverenskommelsen!"
− KDU:s Sara Skyttedal hade satt
en champagneflaska på kylning.

In October 2015, the smallest opposition party, the Christian Democrats, held its party conference and on October 9, the parliament voted on the December Agreement. Party leader Ebba Busch Thor summed up her main argument for maintaining the agreement with "Pacta sunt servanda. Agreements entered into must be kept." Sara Skyttedal (chair of KDU), Lars Adaktusson (EU parliamentarian) and the influential Christian Democrat Anders Andersson were three prominent critics of the agreement. Anders Andersson, who otherwise almost always went in line with the party leadership, later told how he had not received a response in a meeting with voters when he tried to talk about the party's policy because voters instead mainly wanted to criticize the December Agreement and that this was the reason why he saw it as his duty to work for an order where the Prime Minister was forced to listen to parliamentary opinion and the general public.

The conference voted in favor of the proposal to actively leave the December Agreement. Later that day, first the Moderate party leader Kinberg Batra, and then the other alliance parties, announced that the agreement had been revoked by the Christian Democrats' decision. Therefore, the Moderates and the People's Party did not have to address the issue at their congresses later in the autumn.

In a comment, the journalist KG Bergström wrote that "KD's decision to leave DÖ is one of the most unexpected and sensational political decisions I have experienced in thirty years as a political watcher." Marcus Oscarsson commented that just one week before the Christian Democrats' vote, all political experts in Sweden agreed that it would not happen. He did not agree with Kinberg Batra that the agreement had automatically fallen for all parties involved in connection with the withdrawal of the Christian Democrats, but that the other alliance parties followed suit because they would otherwise have received less support in future opinion polls.

Although the intention of the December Agreement was to exclude the Sweden Democrats from influence, the party's main issue, migration, was not one of the areas pointed out for cooperation and talks in the agreement. But 14 days after it had been dissolved, the migration agreement was announced on 23 October 2015 where the same six parliamentary parties had agreed on a 21-point action plan to deal with the refugee crisis that had arisen after the Syrian civil war, that the Islamic State declared its caliphate and that neighboring countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Sudan made their refugee policy much more restrictive, a process that took about three years.

After the agreement

After the December Agreement had been dissolved, Swedish politics continued as if it still applied: the Alliance parties did not propose a common budget and the parliamentary weak red-green government was allowed to rule on as if nothing had happened. By breaking the isolation of the Sweden Democrats, the Alliance could have taken government power, but still chose not to do so.

In the book Förhandla eller DÖ? political scientists Ulf Bjereld and Jonas Hinnfors discussed three alternative possibilities for Sweden to be governed by strong governments:

1. Break the isolation of the Sweden Democrats and that the red-greens or the Alliance ruled with the support of that party
2. Form a cross-bloc government (Alliance and the Red-Greens)
3. Continue to comply in practice with the December Agreement, even if it had been formally terminated

2018–2019

In the budget vote in December 2018, the Moderates and the Christian Democrats presented a joint budget against the transition government Löfven's budget. The Sweden Democrats announced that they intended to vote on the opposition budget, which would give that budget more votes in the Riksdag than the transitional government's proposal. The Center Party and the Liberals considered following the spirit of the December Agreement [citation needed] by voting on the transitional government's budget to deprive the Sweden Democrats from influence. In the vote, they abstained and the Moderates and the Christian Democrats' budget received support in the Riksdag.

In January 2019, 131 days after the parliamentary elections in September 2018, Stefan Löfven took office as Prime Minister after reaching an agreement with the Green Party, the Center Party and the Liberals, in what was called the January Agreement.

See also

• The national unity government Hansson III, which ruled Sweden during World War II, was without real political opposition during the period.
• January Agreement

Notes and references

 

Further reading

Ulf Bjereld, Karin Eriksson & Jonas Hinnfors. Förhandla eller DÖ. Decemberöverenskommelsen och svensk demokrati i förändring (2016) ISBN 9789173895118. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlas. [[Category:Political history of Sweden]]