Swedish social democrats are trying to deal with the crisis. The party leader has resigned (or rather being forced to resign) after an unprecedented short period of time in office, 10 months. They have lost almost half of its voters in just a few years and the bottom may not have been reached. The powerful Executive Committee (Sw Verkställande Utskottet, VU) has five members and eight deputy members – what a fantastic composition! VU’s immediate task is to identify a new party leader or at least the process to find the new leader. Last Thursday and Friday they had meetings discussing if there was a vote of confidence with respect to the party leader Håkan Juholt. The meetings went on for some twenty hours in two days. Then VU announced that there was a vote of confidence in Mr. Juholt only for him resigning the day after – is that not a credible story to be told! Yesterday VU met again for another marathon meeting until midnight without reaching a conclusion. New meetings will take place today.
With all respect that there may be delicate matters to discuss, but how could 10-12 hours and beyond meetings in a group of some dozen people, lead anywhere?! Journalists monitor developments every hour and ask the same questions over and over again about the results and get the same answers over and over again that VU is addressing some difficult and unique issues which have not yet been resolved. None has questioned whether these meetings are actually dysfunctional and in fact a telling illustration of the crisis. Moreover, speculations about names for the job as party leader are endless. As well as reporting about how many of these names that have declared that they are not interested. None has questioned whether all these no’s are a telling illustration of the crisis. To be continued…