Election watch: It did hit the fan, in a major way

"Swedish Watergate" (a.k.a Leijongate): One of the purposes of this blog right now is to give y’all news about the Swedish election campaign in English. But the magnitude of the still developing scandal – how the Liberal party has been spying on the Social Democratic Party – now means that you also can read about it at the BBC website!

One thing that the BBC article is not referring to is how the leader of the Liberal party, Lars Leijonborg, more or less lied on nine o’clock news yesterday. All Monday and Tuesday Mr. Leijonborg has been trying to blame the whole scandal on “young activists”, protecting the Secretary General of the Liberal Party, Johan Jakobsson. But Leijonborg knew, already on Sunday night, that Jakobsson learnt about the spying in March!!! But Leijonborg did not tell us the truth for two longs day. Not when Swedish journalists asked what he and/or Jakobsson did know. Or when Leijonborg spoke to the Swedish Prime Minister about it.

What do you think would have happened if the leader of the Social Democratic party had been covering up and withholding information like this for two days? Not telling the truth when asked on national television? Take a wild guess.

This will of course hurt the Liberal Party, and thus the alliance of the four right-wing parties, badly. It has been proved that the Liberal Party used the information they stole from the Social Democratic intranet in order to prepare their own political counter-attacks. If the scandal continues, the Liberal Party should worry about the four percent threshold they need to pass in order to get in to the Riksdag.

But this scandal might also demobilize voters, and that normally hurt the Social Democrats.

I hope that the Liberal Party has told us everything, for by now we should know if more people (individuals or parties) are involved. Then the election campaign will continue soon. And I hope we, the members of the Social Democratic party, will use all our energy to talk about our own political proposals, visions and ideas. That's enough to win this.

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I participated in a very interesting political seminar today, hosted by SNS. The topic was the media, the voters and election campaigns and it was broadcasted on SVT. You can watch the whole two-hour seminar here, my main contribution starts roughly after one hour and nineteen minutes.