Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is too far left for Sweden's ruling Social Democrats, official says
The Week via Yahoo! News ^ | February 21, 2020 | by Peter Weber
Posted on 2/21/2020, 7:38:33 AM by Oldeconomybuyer
Johan Hassel, the international secretary for Sweden's ruling Social Democrats, visited Iowa before the caucuses, and he wasn't impressed with America's standard bearer for democratic socialism, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "We were at a Sanders event, and it was like being at a Left Party meeting," he told Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, according to one translation. "It was a mixture of very young people and old Marxists, who think they were right all along. There were no ordinary people there, simply."
Hassel was most "impressed" with Pete Buttigieg, though he also liked Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Some more context: The “Left Party” he talks about in there is the old Communist Party back home in Sweden. (They changed their name around 1990 or so -- wonder why.)
The Left/Communists have worked with the Social Democrats in minority parliaments, but never included in cabinet.
Why would a Swedish Social Democrat favor Buttigieg over Sanders? Well, democratic socialism is different than Sweden's social democracy - the "Nordic model" Sanders touts - "and, unfortunately, Sanders has contributed to this confusion," writes MIT political economist Daron Acemoglu. Democratic socialism seeks to fix the iniquities of the market economy by handing control of the means of production to a company's workers or "an administrative structure operated by the state," he explains. "European social democracy is a system for regulating the market economy, not for supplanting it."
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