In the Swedish Reichstag you sit differently.

The MPs do not take their seats sorted by parliamentary group, but rather according to their constituencies.

“So you don't have your party friends, but your neighbors,” said Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier when he spoke to the king, selected members of parliament and diplomats in the Reichstag on Tuesday.

Parliament is officially still in the summer recess.

Last days of rest before it gets hectic again in Stockholm.

Because politically these are very complicated times, regardless of whether you have your neighbor or your party colleague sitting next to you.

Steinmeier is also aware of this.

Matthias Wyssuwa

Political correspondent for Northern Germany and Scandinavia based in Hamburg.

  • Follow I follow

His state visit to Sweden is the first by a federal president since 2003 and the first state visit to Sweden at all since the outbreak of the corona pandemic.

The attention is certain to him.

Crown Princess Victoria and her husband received him and his wife Elke Büdenbender at the airport.

Then it went to the royal riding stables to get into carriages and finally with King Carl XVI.

Gustaf and Queen Silvia and four horsepower to drive to the castle in the old town.

The entire Swedish government stood there to greet the state guest - including Prime Minister Stefan Löfven.

He recently announced that he no longer wanted to be Prime Minister.

That doesn't make the situation in Sweden any easier.

Accompanied by the king and queen

Steinmeier will be accompanied by the king and queen throughout the state visit, a rare honor, they say. He will look at electric trucks and visit the University Hospital of the Karolinska Institute to find out about work during the pandemic and about artificial intelligence in medicine. Then on Thursday he will fly further to Kiruna north of the Arctic Circle to go down into a pit. Innovation and sustainability are the headlines of his journey. "We have in common," said Steinmeier in a statement with the king in the castle, "that we believe in progress."

On Tuesday afternoon we went to the Reichstag and thus to the center of the unrest in Swedish politics. After the 2018 election and in a fragmented parliament with eight parliamentary groups, the social democrat Löfven had saved himself in a minority government with the Greens and convinced two bourgeois parties to support him. He had made many concessions and put his party in the middle. Some still resent him today.

The alliance wobbled again and again, until in early summer the Left Party publicly withdrew its trust in the dispute over the liberalization of rent policy and finally voted accordingly in parliament with the bourgeois opposition and the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats.

Löfven fell, again forged an alliance, first to come back - and then to announce his retreat.

In November he wants to resign from the party leadership and as prime minister, his successor is open and so is the question of whether his alliance will survive the change.

In a year there will be another election, and the Social Democrats will be faced with a newly sorted bourgeois bloc that is even ready to accept the support of the right-wing populists in order to come to power.

One thing is certain: it remains complicated.

Steinmeier is now in no position to provide advice on something like this.

Even if he had to help a little with finding a coalition even after the 2017 federal elections and the failed Jamaica negotiations, he said at the time whoever applied for responsibility for elections should not shirk it when he was holding it in his hand.

"The Federal Republic has not yet had this experience"

In an interview published on Tuesday in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Steinmeier was also asked about the long explorations after elections in Sweden and Germany. The sheer duration of coalition negotiations doesn't bother him so much, he said. Where four or five parties had to explore coalition options, the talks would become more complicated and take time. "But it becomes a serious problem if the negotiations are escalated and uncompromising, if the election campaign continues after the election." In Sweden there is the instrument of minority governments. "The Federal Republic has not yet had this experience."

Before his speech in the Reichstag, Steinmeier speaks with the President of Parliament Andreas Norlén, he speaks with representatives of the parliamentary groups and in the evening in private with Löfven.

In plenary he lists the things that Germans admired about the Swedes: the social model, the great achievements in gender equality, progressive family policy and the cohesion of society.

“We marvel at the ability of Swedish politics,” he also says, “in the midst of social change and increasing fragmentation in the party system to set up stable coalitions and effective governments again and again.” And he adds: “If I look at the upcoming If you watch the Bundestag elections in Germany, then Berlin may soon have to learn from this ability. "