The Left Party joins the Red-Green coalition (2008)
In December 2008 the Left Party agreed, for the first time, to enter a binding Red-Green coalition government with the Social Democrats and the Greens if the three parties won the 2010 election.
- Correction Economy V In December 2008 the Left Party committed for the first time to join a binding Red-Green coalition government with the Social Democrats and Greens if they won the 2010 election.
Why this verdict?
V had historically refused binding coalition government participation, seeing independence as essential to their left-wing identity. Ahead of the 2010 election V publicly committed to joining a Red-Green coalition government with S and MP if they won. The commitment was announced before the election, giving voters a clear signal. Correction.
For most of its history the Left Party had governed from outside. It propped up Social Democratic cabinets and traded its votes for a say over the budget, but it never took a seat at the cabinet table. That suited it: the party could push policy without owning the compromises that come with running a government.
On 7 December 2008 the Left Party agreed to join a binding Red-Green coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens. All three pledged to govern together if they won the 2010 election. For the first time the party was offering to be a full partner in government rather than a support party bargaining from the sidelines.
The three parties were assembling a joint opposition bloc against the sitting centre-right Alliance government, and the pledge to govern as one unit was the point of it: voters would head into the 2010 election knowing exactly who would form the next government, instead of waiting for the answer until the votes were counted.
For how we weigh a step like this, see how we read a value shift: we check whether a party’s stated position and its formal commitments line up. Here the Left Party’s long stretch outside government gave way to a signed agreement to enter one.
Related entities
On the values timeline
- 1990Economy · In 1990 the party dropped 'the Communists' from its name and removed communism from its programme, becoming simply the Left Party.
- you are here2008Economy · In December 2008 the Left Party committed for the first time to join a binding Red-Green coalition government with the Social Democrats and Greens if they won the 2010 election.
- 2021Economy · Brought down a sitting Social Democratic prime minister over market-rate rents — the first no-confidence vote to succeed.
- 2024EU · At its May 2024 congress in Jönköping the Left Party dropped its long-standing active demand that Sweden leave the EU, keeping exit only as a last resort.
- 2024Security & defence · After Sweden joined NATO in 2024, the Left Party stopped demanding an immediate exit and accepted membership as a reality, while pushing to keep distance and bar nuclear weapons.
- C1995After governing in the centre-right Bildt cabinet, Centerpartiet crossed the bloc line in spring 1995 and entered close budget cooperation with the Social Democrats, taking shared responsibility for the austerity package that consolidated state finances through 1998.
- S1997Under Goran Persson, the Social Democrats made budget consolidation and a public-finance surplus target the core of fiscal policy by 1997, subordinating their older deficit-spending tradition.
- M2006Reinvented as "the New Moderates", accepting the welfare state to win the centre.
- MP2019To stay in government after the 2018 deadlock, the Greens signed the 73-point January Agreement in 2019 and accepted market-liberal reforms they had earlier resisted, including inquiries into market rents and looser labour rules.