Jacob Wallenberg troubled by Sweden’s ‘shift to the left’
Sweden’s leading industrialist has sounded the alarm over a likely leftward shift after September’s elections, warning it could lead entrepreneurs to flee the Nordic country.
Jacob Wallenberg, whose family foundations indirectly control nearly half of Stockholm’s stock exchange, told the Financial Times that “a massive shift to the left” in recent weeks worried him because it called into question reforms in Sweden over the past decade.
“If there is a new government and if they change the rules – be that on taxation, labour, a number of different things – the risk you are running is that you see entrepreneurs leaving the country or electing to do other things,” said Mr Wallenberg. He added that he and other business leaders wanted to see “predictability and stability”.
Sweden’s current centre-right government are on course for defeat in September’s elections after governing for eight years, according to opinion polls that make the centre-left Social Democrats the leading party. But the pro-industry Social Democrats will need the support of one or most likely both of the Greens and the Left Party.
Both have caused consternation in business circles by taking a far more radical tack than the Social Democrats. Mr Wallenberg pointed to policies such as the Green’s desire for a no-growth society and the Left Party’s repudiation of centre-right reforms that have brought in private equity companies to run school and hospitals.
“What do they want to do? They want to take away all the freedom choices we are talking about. They have a different view on the role of government. They think government should run things,” said Mr Wallenberg, who is a director of Ericsson, ABB, SAS as well as chairman of his family investment vehicle, Investor.
Many of Sweden’s best-known entrepreneurs – such as Ikea’s Ingvar Kamprad and Hans Rausing of Tetra Pak – left the country in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of high taxation. The centre-right government has cut income tax five times and scrapped the wealth tax, scoring a publicity coup when Mr Kamprad ended his tax exile in Switzerland this year.
The Greens – who were the second-biggest party in June’s European elections behind the Social Democrats – have proposed closing Stockholm’s central Bromma airport and stopping construction of a bypass around the capital.
Anders Borg, Sweden’s centre-right finance minister for the past eight years, told the Financial Times: “This is basically much more of a leftwing experiment than we have probably ever seen in Swedish history.”
But his likely successor, Magdalena Andersson of the Social Democrats, deflected the criticism and said her party would work with any other political grouping aside from the populist right Sweden Democrats. Asked about the Green’s no-growth policy and closure of Bromma, she added: “I think you are pointing to some of the reasons why the Green party might not be quite as big in national elections as they were in the European parliament elections.”
The most recent Ipsos opinion poll in June gave the three centre-left parties 49.8 per cent of the vote against 35.6 per cent for the four centre-right parties. The Social Democrats topped the polls with 31 per cent, followed by the governing Moderates with 21 per cent and the Greens with 11 per cent.
Outside of the two main groupings are the Sweden Democrats with 10 per cent and a new party, the Feminist Initiative, with 3.7 per cent, just below the threshold to enter parliament.