DemoCoder said:
I think Sweden's most right-wing politicians would be ultra-far left in the US, and US's ultra-left wing democrats would be considered right-wing fascists in Sweden.
It's not quite that bad, but it's true that the Swedish culture has been very leftist for a long time. I agree with pretty much everything the other Swedes in here have said, Sweden is more leftist than its people really, but the rightist parties are too scary sometimes. It's kinda interesting, we have seven major parties, of which only two are left, four and right and then we have this environment party (or green party) that's floating around not really belonging to either block. We have from left to right:
Left party - Formerly communists, but that changed quite some time ago. I respected their leader, Gudrun Shyman, until she got caught cheating on taxes recently. She made a lot for getting women equal in the society. It's scary however now that she left her position because of that tax scandal you can almost see some of that communistic ideas getting back.
Social democrats - The current government. Left of center. Too much leftists for my liking, but the only party that actually does anything to get rid of that huge national debt we have. They have brought us way too many governmental services through the years though that's bringing the economy down.
Center party - Considered to be on the right block. Pretty much a no-name party. They could probably get more votes if they made more noise during the election periods.
Christ democrats - Conservative christian. The party of the 1800's sort of. They seam so, I don't know, hypocritical. Not living according to their standards, at least that's my feelings.
Liberal party (Folkpartiet) - Had some respect for these guys until they brought rascism into their agenda in the last election. Scarily, the went from 10% to 20% most likely because of that.
Moderates - Conservative, far right. Every time you hear a politician propose a really stupid idea you can be pretty sure that it's a moderate. It never fails. The ideas tend to come back later on however in a patched version has fixed the faults that should have been obviuos to everyone with some common sense from the beginning.
Personally, I'm all over the place in my opionions. Which is the reason I didn't vote the last election, there was no party speaking for me. Would I have voted I would probably have voted on the social democrats, at least they do something right, but there's a lot left to fix. We really need more rightist thinking in economics, I'm all for privatising a load of federal services. Something gotta be done about the health-care system too. Sweden with the world strongest worker protection laws is the country with probably the highest rate of work-related early retirement. It's too easy to get an early retirement and live of tax money for the rest of the life. The social democrats however doesn't see this. And noone does anything about integrating the butt-load of immegrants we get into the society. Oh, well ...
It will be interesting to see where everyone else ends up.