Swedish minister and leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party speaks about strengthening global tax policy at the 2016 IMF World Bank Spring Meeting in Washington. Joshua Roberts File Photo Reuters
Cape Town - Sweden’s opposition blue bloc inched ahead and gained 49.7% of votes following Monday morning’s general election vote count.
Xinhua News Agency reported that 90% of votes have been counted with the results pointing to a new government after eight years of Social Democrat rule.
Sweden’s far-right blue bloc comprises the Moderate Party, the Christian Democrats, the Liberal Party and the Sweden Democrats, while the red bloc, which has earned 48.8% of votes, is made up of the Social Democratic Party, the Left Party, the Green Party and the Centre Party.
There are 349 seats in the Swedish parliament, and with more than 90% of the votes already counted, the blue bloc has gathered 176 parliamentary seats against 173 for the red bloc.
“As far as the government issue is concerned, there is a long way to go before any conclusions can be drawn,” said Mats Knutson, a Swedish Television’s political commentator.
According to the Guardian news, a conclusive result can only be given once the votes of Swedes living abroad have been counted later this week. However, the leader of the Sweden Democrats (SD) said there will likely be a change of power and that the blue bloc is headed to seizing victory.
Tobias Hübinette, a lecturer in intercultural studies at Karlstad University and a leading anti-racist, said the SD was “by far the biggest party in the world with Nazi roots”, having emerged from Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement in the mid-1990s.
“Even if the party officially condemns its own race ideological roots, this background is today still present in the sense that the SD is still … seeing itself as the only political force that can save the native white Swedish majority population,” said Hübinette.
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