MAUD OLOFSSON'S CENTRE PARTY

I just watched Åke Ortmarks interview with the leader of the Centre Party, Maud Olofsson, and thought I might make a few remarks on that. Firstly, however, I'd like to say that Mr Ortmark's program, "O som i Ortmark", is one of the best political programs on Swedish television. Mr Ortmark poses well formulated and sharp questions that quickly reveals if the person being interviewed is trying to pull off a populistic stunt, rather than make an honest answer. In a country such as this where most political programs have a clear left wing agenda, it's nice to see that there is still some honest journalism where the journalist actually tries to find out what the political leaders think about different things, and reveal whether they are being honest with us or not. It's a pity that the program is being televised on TV8 - not because there's anything wrong with TV8 but because there are very few people who can watch it.

Ever since Maud Olofsson took over the Centre party in 2001 she has tried to make an impression of taking the party towards the right (without going too far - she calls her party the Left of the Right). The party now claims to be "liberal" (which is Europe means centre-right rather than left), which is something new, to my knowledge. Under her leadership the party has also attached itself pretty solidly to the centre-right opposition. This too is new - between 1994 and 1998 the party supported the Social Democratic government (without being a part of it). There is still some co-operation with the socialists though - mostly in energy politics, where her party opposes nuclear energy (not as fiercly as before, perhaps) but leaves everybody in the dark regarding what exactly should replace it.

The main point, that she wanted to make, was that the Centre party now, as a liberal party, has a positive view on market solutions. To a free market classical liberal, such as myself, this sounds very promising. However, when she was given the chance to explain what this really meant, the positive glow sort of came off. Market solutions, Centre party style, means that the market (which she consistently spoke of as a homogenous entity) would provide solutions to problems defined by the polititians. That seems all right to me, although it would've been nice to know what kind of problem the polititians would be fit to define, in her view. Then she took it all a step further, and unfortunalty not in the right direction. Polititians should not only define the problems that needed to be solved; they should also design the actual solutions. What the market then should do, is to implement these solutions. Why this should be considered a market solution is beyond me. In fact, with the big welfare states being evermore difficult to finance, this is pretty much exactly the solution that most pragmatic Social Democrat/Labour parties in Europe has gone for. It still leaves all the control with the polititians, but leaves the cut cost bit to the market. Not exactly a stunningly liberal idea.