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The election system in Sweden
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True or false? In Sweden, riksdag elections are held on the third Sunday in September.
Danni is in Sweden. And she wants ice cream. But, what’s this? They’re telling her she must pay with a card? Don’t you have a bank card, Danni?
Danni is not happy about this. She thinks that all shops should have to accept cash. Hey Danni, maybe you want to decide things in Sweden? Thought so. So you’ll need to be elected to Sweden’s parliament, the Riksdag.
Sweden has parliamentary elections every 4 years, on the second Sunday in September. Sweden is divided into 29 electoral districts. Each district is allocated a certain number of places in the Riksdag - called ‘mandates’ - depending on how many people live in each district. 310 mandates are shared between the districts. And another 39 mandates are shared between the parties.
And this is in proportion to how many votes each party got in the whole of the country. These mandates are called levelling mandates. So all in all, there are 349 elected people, members of the Riksdag, in the Riksdag. If you want to run in the election for the Riksdag, you first have to be a Swedish citizen and you’ll have to join a party, or start your own! Now you can run in the election!
But to actually get into the Riksdag, people have to vote for you. Voting happens at a polling station. And people vote using these pieces of paper: ballot papers. The blue ballot papers are for the county council, or region. The white ones are to decide who runs your municipality.
Those yellow ballot papers are the ones you’re interested in, Danni. They are for the Riksdag election. The parties have their own ballot papers, on which is written a list of names. These are the people that the party has appointed as candidates in each district. So in Sweden you only vote for a party, not a person?
Not exactly. If you think that one of the candidates would be especially good as a member of the Riksdag, you can put a cross in front of that person’s name. A personal vote. If that candidate gets more than five percent of the party’s votes in that district, they get the mandate. But aren’t there any ballot papers for your party, Danni?
That’s not very unusual: there are many parties in Sweden, and they don’t all have ballot papers in all the polling stations. But people can still vote for your party! Using a blank ballot paper, and writing the party’s name. If they want to vote for a specific person, they can write the name of the person they want to vote for. Because there are so many parties, not all of them can be in the Riksdag.
Only those parties that get more than four percent of the whole country’s votes get into the Riksdag. This is known as the four percent barrier. I’m sorry, you didn’t get four percent of the votes, Danni. But your party still got a mandate! If a party gets more than twelve percent of the votes in one electoral district, that party can get a mandate in the Riksdag.
And you did get more than 12% in one district! When all the votes have been counted and all the parties know how many mandates they will receive, the speaker of the Riksdag has an important task: To suggest a Prime Minister, who has enough support in the Riksdag to be able to form a government. Sometimes it’s easy: if a party has a clear majority, it can form a government. If not, several parties can come together to form a government, if their combined votes give them a majority. Either a coalition government.
Or a minority government supported by other parties. But sometimes it’s tricky to find a stable majority. Well now that you’ve been elected to the Riksdag you can propose a bill that everyone has to accept cash! Good luck!