Two politicians – two worlds

Politics is not just a question of legislative proposals and government budgets. Politics is to a large degree also about lifestyle and attitudes to power. This may be difficult to discern today when the parties are to a great extent populated by a political class whose salaries are paid by the State. The situation was different in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when the two dominant politicians in Sweden were Olof Palme and Thorbjörn Fälldin.

They personified different worlds – on the one hand, the academic, “modern” political and cultural establishment of the stress-filled Swedish capital, which had a blind faith in experts at government agencies and in political theories that aimed to create new humans, and on the other, the naturally conservative lifestyle of the countryside, which relied on traditions and people’s own ability to solve problems.

When, days after the historic electoral loss for the Social Democrats in 1976, Dieter Strand reported in Aftonbladet on the formation of a non-Social Democrat government, it is difficult to determine whether he was being ironic or fascinated. The person forming the government, Strand noted, is taking it calmly. “When one looks for Fälldin at home on his farm in Ås, his mother Hulda answers the phone: Thorbjörn is probably out harvesting potatoes.”

The media soon noted that Fälldin was overseeing the formation of the government from the Söder family home in the Stockholm suburb of Täby, where he was besieged by journalists and photographers. Strand described how Karin Söder came out onto the stairs and said, “Oh, boys, it’s just terrible not being able to invite you all in. We always do that at home in Värmland, and I’ve made biscuits and all. It’s just that Thorbjörn is sleeping now.”

So that is how it goes when there is a new government in Sweden after 44 years, Strand wrote. “By all means, new prime minister, but first a catnap on the sofa. There is not exactly a rush to the smörgåsbord when farmers are forming a government.”

Still, Strand was probably not being ironic because he noted that it was the popular movement in the countryside that had formed the government. “A movement that in recent years has been closer to the people than we – we in Stockholm, close to the centralised so-called establishment – really understood.”

Fälldin’s calm can be compared to the nervous, irritated impatience that characterised Olof Palme’s quest for more power. Harry Schein has written how his friend Palme “liked to get involved in things that a prime minister really should not get involved in. One does it because one thinks it is fun to decide.”

Here was one of the most crucial differences between Fälldin and Palme. The farmer from Ångermanland saw politics as a tool to help citizens. It could achieve what a person could not do on his own. But the end was always the citizen. For Palme, citizens were a means to achieve an ideological ambition. The socialist conviction was so strong that, in itself, it legitimated the increasing centralisation of political power and its shifting from citizens to politicians.

Palme’s strong commitment to social visions of an equal society gave him an advantage when it came to rhetoric and debate. In the duel between Prime Minister Fälldin and Palme, then leader of the opposition, broadcast live in the 1982 election campaign, it was rather grey, pragmatic industriousness versus colourful visions. Palme spoke with enthusiasm about “getting Sweden going”, about “offensive faith in the future” and about how “we need fewer waist belts [svångrem] and more elbow room [svängrum]”.

Palme accused Fälldin of holding back on investments and wanting to balance the State budget again through streamlining and cuts. “We dare not invest in the future.” Even though Fälldin had implemented major savings, the deficit had actually grown, Palme explained. The alternative to petty industriousness was offensive investments, in part via wage earners’ investment funds.

In terms of emotion, it is not hard to understand why many in the electorate were carried away. Palme was clever at playing with emotions. Fälldin’s taking of responsibility came across as unglamorous and tedious. His emphasis on the preposterousness of letting public costs run out of control fell on deaf ears. Palme got 45.6 per cent of the electorate to vote for the Social Democrats, a result never attained before.

It turns out that Olof Palme had planned a major devaluation of 16 per cent, which was carried out in the days following his election victory, with the aim of living up to the rhetoric of fewer waist belts and more elbow room. Swedish industry would gain competitive advantages internationally by holding a sale on the Swedish krona. In the short term, Palme could avoid unpopular decisions on savings, but in the long term Sweden’s adapting to new times was delayed. Many commentators think that Palme contributed to Sweden’s fall on the world’s lists of well-being.

For him, politics was about big gestures, about large-scale plans. During the 1970s, the Social Democrats’ showpiece project was Steelworks 80. In the election year of 1973, the State-owned steel producer NJA presented plans for an extensive expansion of the steelworks in Luleå in northern Sweden. Work began on a major new harbour, thousands of new residences were to be built, and in the town centre older buildings made way for new office complexes. Business leaders like Pehr G Gyllenhammar gave their blessing.

Perhaps Palme was saved in the extremely close election of 1973 by these grandiose plans. However, it soon became apparent that this was all a gigantic economic fiasco.

But this large-scale thinking and central planning were in tune with the times. There was widespread agreement between Social Democrats, the business community and a number of economists that small enterprises were a thing of the past in the economic history of humankind. In future, all economic activity would be planned in large corporations and the State. Mass production in standardised forms had not just created profits but also greater well-being and cheaper products for consumers.

Assembly line production also had its counterpart in the form of government. Democracy would be made more efficient. When local authorities were merged into larger units, tens of thousands of local political appointments disappeared, and politics started to become a profession in earnest. A professionalisation of politics was also necessary given that the public sector was to become increasingly responsible for social security, from cradle to grave.

Yet one voice in the choir sang a different tune. Since the battle over pensions began in the late 1950s, the agrarian Centre Party had begun to develop ever stronger opposition to large-scale thinking and social development. If Olof Palme grew into his role as spokesman for the spirit of the era, Thorbjörn Fälldin came to be modelled as his opponent.

In the ballot on national supplementary pensions, the Centre Party held its own line, the personal voluntary line, which required a reasonable general pension that was the same for everyone, but maintained that citizens should also take out private pension insurance. The Conservatives and the Liberals advocated a collective agreement solution and the Social Democrats a State-controlled system.

The battle over pensions entailed a harsh ideological debate. SLU-bladet, the organ for the Swedish Rural Youth League, wrote, “Centre youth oppose the forced legislation proposed by Socialists and Liberals. We believe that the Government, by legislating occupational pensions, is climbing over the fence into the garden patch that citizens themselves should be entitled to decide on.”

And in the Riksdag in 1958, the parliamentary group which Fälldin then belonged to wrote, “Society should therefore not dictate beyond basic social security how individuals should dispose of their income for various ends and between their active and passive years.”

What was headstrong about this voluntary approach, compared to liberal opinion-makers, was that it entailed a bottom-up perspective. The argument was founded on and included families with small or average incomes. It was predicated on the view that in the countryside it had long been both a necessity and a desire that people manage their affairs on their own or together with others, not via dictates from Stockholm. These rural values brought Fälldin to politics. Prior to his election victory in 1979, he said at the Centre Party conference, “Many problems have to be solved through cooperation based on shared goals, with room for personal initiative and demands for personal responsibility. In that way, people are brought up to take responsibility for each other in every phase of life. That is when solidarity can achieve its full potential.”

Here, voluntariness in civil society is contrasted with forced power in the State. Fälldin highlights citizens’ own initiative; he wants people to be brought up to take responsibility. That is when solidarity is created. In this way, he gives new meaning to one of the bywords of the left: solidarity is something each and everyone signs up for of their own free will; it is not accomplished through force. Solidarity is an action on its own, not an abstraction carried out via high taxes.

Fälldin did the same thing with another of the most popular concepts in politics, equality. He saw basic social security through public insurance programmes as the fairest principle in equality policy. He strongly objected to the Social Democrats cementing the inequalities in salaries between citizens via the principle of loss of income, whereby State systems subsidise a fall in income. In a Riksdag debate on family policy concerning child care allowances for parents with small children in the spring of 1976, he said, “The Social Democrats are not prepared to see society’s support for this important (household) work as equally valuable, and make it just as large in kronor terms regardless of what income people have.”

Family policy can illustrate the differences between Palme and Fälldin. For Fälldin, a world view develops, based not on macroeconomic forecasts but rather on a perspective in which the home was the starting point. It is at home that a large part of people’s lives is shaped. It is also there that Fälldin’s social critique begins. For instance, he was worried about the future of families just starting out, given the trend he could observe in Sweden in the 1960s, as more and more people left the countryside to move into newly built concrete city suburbs.

In his inaugural speech as party leader in Halmstad in 1971, he said that this trend “has meant that time-honoured social networks have fallen apart”. Young families wound up isolated in city suburbs “without the natural contact with relatives and friends that is part of the natural pattern of life in a community.”

Relocation politics may have been good for growth, but Fälldin warned of a “new poverty” caused by the vulnerability of families in anonymous concrete suburbs.

An unplanned extra cost or the slightest change in income can have serious consequences and create dependence on government social agencies, he noted – and thus predicted some of the segregation that was a consequence of the “Million Homes” programme.

Olof Palme had a more functional view of social security and saw the continued concentration of people in the suburbs of cities as the way to higher well-being. For him, the State – not relatives – was the key player. In a speech, he said, “When you have been involved in building this society, then you are entitled to receive good care when you are old. You do not need to ask anyone. You are entitled. And that, my fellow attendees, is the core of the wonderful general welfare policy we represent.”

A clear “clientification” of citizens can be seen in Palme’s view of social security. Public employees are to take responsibility, whereas civil society is left out.

Fälldin, in contrast, saw a new kind of poverty arising as families became isolated from friends and relatives in anonymous suburbs. Where Palme saw efficiency, Fälldin saw impoverished social environments.

But so too on more traditional right-left issues like the economy and ownership, the Social Democrats encountered a party that had developed its own inputs, based on the experiences of life in the country that were connected to a centuries-old Swedish tradition of free and freehold farmers.

The Centre Party did not take part in the most charged ideological battle of industrialism, that between labour and capital. Fälldin did not see these as opposites. Farmers own their property and also perform the work on the farm. It is reasonable that the person who owns his land cannot be a proletariat oppressed by the landowner – himself.

In light of this, Thorbjörn Fälldin had another perspective in his defence of ownership than other non-Socialists. That may be an important explanation for why Olof Palme’s well-documented difficulty dealing with a Centre Party grew ever stronger during his first decade as party leader.

Palme had grown used to ownership being defended by the landed gentry, the enemies of the labour movement. Debates were won by casting suspicion on ownership rights disguised as class interest.

But for Fälldin, ownership was about the opposite: it protects the general public from the concentration of power. The freedom and autonomy of many farmers and small business operators from the powers that be were guaranteed through ownership. Ownership was, quite simply, the foremost tool for equality – thus the exact opposite of what socialism maintains.

The Centre Party was the dissenting voice in this matter. Their breakthrough in Swedish cities in the 1970s occurred largely among these very same small business owners. Safeguarding ownership was also the reason Fälldin categorically distanced himself from all forms of wage-earners’ investment funds in his dealings with both the Swedish Employers Association (SAF) and the Conservative Party.

Olof Palme, who was said to be doubtful about the funds in private, justified them with democracy when he held a speech: “Those who say no to employees’ rightful demands to protect against the undemocratic influence of big owners of capital and guard against major disparities and lingering privileges, they threaten the very foundation of the continued social structure. They threaten jobs. They threaten social security.”

What for Palme was a question of enhancing social security was for Fälldin an example of new methods to centralise power. Whereas Palme saw greater justice in utopia, Fälldin saw growing gaps between those with political power and those without. Whereas Fälldin saw enhanced social security in enhanced individual ownership, Palme saw growing divides between the haves and the have-nots. Their perspectives were diametrically opposed.

The critique that civilisation is moving toward ever greater large-scale measures in social planning gave the Centre Party and Thorbjörn Fälldin their growing force in popular opinion. The question is whether essential parts of this critique still have significant thrust from a bottom-up perspective.

With Social Democrat-coloured glasses, it is not difficult to understand why Olof Palme comes across as the last real Social Democratic party leader. He spoke not just about everyday political issues, about water and sewage, but about ideology and visions.

He spoke enthusiastically in favour of socialism and equality. He was straightforward and willing to take a position. Today we lack politicians who state their values so clearly and how these are to be applied in practice.

In some way, Swedish politics has become sterile since these two gentlemen dominated the stage. Party politics has been reduced from a struggle over perspectives on society and large brushstrokes to an almost administrative focus on percentages in social insurance and the banalities of management details. Part of the very breath of life for democracy is also taking a step back and trying to see the whole picture. In this sense, Palme and Fälldin were probably closer to one another than to any of today’s party leaders.