To analyse. The Commitment to Reducing Inequalities Index, produced by the NGO Oxfam and published on October 12, went almost unnoticed in Sweden. However, it confirms a worrying basic trend, underlined for several years by numerous studies: far from the model of an egalitarian society, where the differences in income would be minimal and the opportunities similar for all, the gap between the richest and the poorest continues to widen.
Still world champion in the fight against economic inequality in 2017, the Scandinavian kingdom now ranks in twentieth place, far behind its Nordic neighbors, and even after France (12e). It’s’“one of the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development where economic inequality has increased the most in recent decades”, said Suzanne Standfast, secretary general of Oxfam Sweden, when the report was published. According to her, this development is partly explained by the fact that labor income is much more taxed than capital income.
Recently awarded the Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism for his essay Girig-Sverige (“Greedy Sweden”, untranslated), journalist Andreas Cervenka describes how the folkhemmet (“the people’s house”) – a concept dear to the Swedish social democrats, builders of the welfare state – has been transformed “in paradise for the super-rich”. In 1996, he recalls, Sweden had twenty-eight billionaires. They are now 1,095, according to a study by the Credit Suisse Research Institute. The number of households living below the poverty line has never been so high.
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Yet very little was said about this reality during the election campaign, during which the right and the far right, who won the election on 11 September, managed to impose the idea that the main problem of Sweden was immigration and integration. While the deadly settling of scores between rival gangs multiplied, the theme of insecurity dominated, leaving very little room for debate on the disintegration of the Swedish model on the way to becoming a counter-model, due to a policy neoliberal which swears only by privatizations, deregulations and the retreat of the State.
The seeds were planted in the 1990s. Sweden then experienced an unprecedented economic and financial crisis. GDP is falling, public debt is soaring and unemployment is soaring. At the same time, on the right, but also in the ranks of the Social Democratic Party, criticism emerged against a state deemed too interventionist and centralized. Neoliberal theories seduce. Even today, many political personalities, such as the centrist leader Annie Lööf as well as the conservative speaker of Parliament, Andreas Norlén, admit their admiration for the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher or the former President of the United States Ronald Reagan.
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