Divided We Fall? Negotiating Responses to a Radical Right-wing Party within the Swedish Labour Movement

This paper analyses the responses of the Swedish labour movement – the Social Democratic Party and the blue-collar union confederation, the LO – to the populist radical right-wing party the Sweden Democrats between 2007 and 2018. Yet it does so from a novel perspective, highlighting the role of 1) temporality and 2) intra-party/organizational dynamics in determining external strategies. The paper shows how intra-organizational learning played a key role in fostering change in the Social Democrats’ and the LO’s strategic responses. Actors learned from the effects of their past strategies and readjusted them accordingly. We hence argue that party responses to challenger parties are best analysed as processes, instead of discrete events, and that acquiring internal consent for strategic shifts represents a central task in this process. The paper is a single-case study of Sweden, a crucial case for studying the de- and realignment of the West European political space since support for the centre-left has declined, while it increased for the radical right. We conduct a chronological, qualitative analysis of intra-party and union sources, defining key events at which strategic shifts took place. Conceptually, we stretch the notion of intra-party politics to include the unions as well, serving as a prime example of the need to internally negotiate external strategies.