Political lies and the rise of Sweden’s right

Political turmoil in Hungary dominates European headlines this week, although some less dramatic but no less significant electoral upheaval in other countries also makes news.

Budapest is burning after Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány admitted to lying in order to win the election. Rioters are calling for his removal from office.

The Wall Street Journal Europe urges calm, democratic reflection. "Hungary’s prime minister isn’t the first politician to lie to get elected and to be called out on it by voters angry at having been deceived," it writes (hmm, to whom else could they be referring?). "But in a modern European democracy, violent rioting by a small minority is not a legitimate way to force out an elected leader - no matter how much that electoral victory is marred by lies."

The BBC News website uses the occasion of the Hungarian premier’s remark (they might also add the Pope’s recent flash of fallibility) to resurrect political gaffes through history. "To someone constantly in the spotlight," it writes, "there is a constant danger that one’s private opinions sneak into the public domain."

The article catalogues gaffes by Ronald Reagan, Silvio Berlusconi and Britain’s ever-quotable Prince Philip, who once asked a Scottish driving instructor, "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"

Swedish voters, meanwhile, succeed in chucking out the Social Democratic party, which has governed the country for all but nine of the last 74 years. Swedish newspapers largely welcome the change of power.

"A good choice, voters," reads Sydsvenska Dagbladet’s editorial headline. "Swedish democracy is about to have oxygen pumped into it."

But outside Sweden there is some shock. Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel asks, "Are the Swedes crazy?" The paper argues that under the Social Democrats Sweden has had a strong economy, low unemployment and a model education system. Obviously its editors haven’t read recent stories in Swedish paper Expressen, which detail how the government masked the high unemployment rate by, for example, labelling job-seekers as "disabled" or even "mentally handicapped".

But over at Le Monde they apparently had read those articles. The French daily notes that Sweden’s real rate of unemployment is 15%, rather than the official 5.7%. It argues that the Social Democrats lost the election because their welfare policies discouraged too many people from working. "This is an intrinsic flaw which the Swedish left has obviously been slow to remedy," it writes, calling this "a lesson for Europe’s left-wing parties". Or even for France.

The success of a far-right party in German local elections raises many editorial eyebrows. Die Welt says the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party’s rise was helped "by the fact that the political elite has ignored the problems in the east for years".

The New York Times says the results worry "analysts". Why we should worry that analysts are worried is not clear, and in any case the paper then quotes an "analyst" who does not in fact sound very worried. "It’s not a danger for our democracy," he said, according to the article.

Political turmoil in Hungary dominates European headlines this week, although some less dramatic but no less significant electoral upheaval in other countries also makes news.