Un nou començament per a Suècia, segons Carl Bild (exprimer ministre de Suècia entre 1991-1994):It´s a little bit easier to wake up in Sweden today - despite all the champagne yesterday.
Sweden gets a new center-right government, Göran Persson resigns, centern is the third biggest party, Fredrick Federley was elected to parliament and Stockholm voted in favour of the alliance and of congestion charges.
For once everything turned out as it should. Thanks, and congratulations to everyboyd who has worked for years to make this possible.
So let´s celebrate some more, but then the hard work begins - to be as suspicious of the new government as we were of the social democrats, and consistently push them in a liberal direction. Power corrups, and friends in power...well, corrupts in some nice, friendly way that we hardly notice before it´s too late.(...)
- Centern is suddenly the third biggest party. It´s nice to be a winner for a change. I think that the liberal swing vote showed its strength today.
- This is the worst election for the social democrats in 80 years. Perhaps this is enough to get Persson not just to step down, but also to lose his control over the party, and then Margot Wallström takes over and modernises the party.
- Sverigedemokraterna gets 1.9 percent, and this underestimates them, since it´s difficult to tell the interviewer that you will vote for the idiots. I would guess that they´ll get around 3 percent. And it´s to early to rule out that they´ll get seats locally.
The Moderate Party under Fredrik Reinfeldt not only did its best election since 1928, but also the best election result of any non-socialist party in modern times, narrowly beating the record set by the Centre party in the 1973 election.
And for the Social Democrats it was their worst election result since 1914 - before the introduction of universal suffrage in Sweden.
Prime Minister Persson immediately announced that he will step down also as leader of the party at an extraordinary congress likely in the beginning of next year. He looked positively happy as he made the announcement.
While previous non-socialist governments that took over in 1976 and in 1991 did so under rather difficult economic circumstances - in 1991 Sweden was losing 1 000 jobs a day and the government deficit was increasing by a billion crowns a week - the situation now is very different.
This is an immediate advantage, but also harbours the risk that the pressure for change will be less than it perhaps ought to be. As numerous international studies have pointed out, there is a need for deep structural reforms in important part of the economy of the country.
But further comments on this will have to await further developmnents.
