Sweden's opposition leader wants to change the country's famed - but expensive - welfare system, but to win elections on Sunday he is trying to persuade Swedes he will just fine-tune it to boost jobs, not destroy it.
Fredrik Reinfeldt, 41, has helped give his Moderate Party and three other centre-right groups a chance at ending the 10-year rule of Social Democrat Prime Minister Goran Persson.
With a message of modest cuts in taxes and jobless benefits, the opposition has a slim lead over Persson in opinion polls. Reinfeldt has dropped his party's previously hostile stance to the welfare state, hoping to woo core Social Democrat voters.
"What we lack is the incentive for work and entrepreneurship to combine with the other things that are very good. We don't want to take away things, we want to add things," Reinfeldt, who would lead any centre-right government, told Reuters.
"You could say that I am not asking for revolution, because I am a deep believer that society should be moved forward in a way where people can feel secure at the same time as the right incentives grow," he added in the interview late on Tuesday.
Reinfeldt, who has re-christened the Moderates the "new workers' party" to steal the clothes of the Social Democrats, is leading a four-party alliance, which includes the Folk Liberal Party, the Centre Party and the Christian Democrats.
He is hoping voter fatigue with Persson, 57, and the long period of rule by the Social Democrats and their allies, the Left Party and the Green Party, will benefit him.
He hopes to lead the first centre-right government since 1994, when Carl Bildt's three-year administration ended. That, and a few years in the 1970s, were short interregnums in the Social Democrat dominance of government since World War Two.
Reinfeldt says the good things about the "Swedish model" include parental leave from work that can extend to 16 months, cheap kindergartens and free hospital care.
The bad side is a net of benefits, funded by some of the world's highest taxes, which give people little incentive to work. The Moderates say this means the real unemployment level is 20 percent, while official statistics put it at 6 percent.
"We also think that in the '90s part of this (welfare) idea has gone astray," Reinfeldt said. "The way for the future is increasing the incentive for work, (to get) better value for money and better results in tax-paid welfare."
Persson, who can boast the fastest economic growth in Sweden for six years in the second quarter, says Reinfeldt's policies will just punish the unemployed by cutting benefits, while giving away tax cuts to the better off. Persson has predicted unemployment will fall further and eventually lead to a labour shortage.
Comments
Comments are closed.