RIYADH, 6 June 2004 — The reputation Sweden enjoys as one of the most democratic and egalitarian countries in the world is well deserved, according to a report released by the Swedish Embassy here.

Democratic elements are strong not only in national, regional and local politics, but also at schools, workplaces, in various interest groups and elsewhere.

In recent decades, however, Swedish democracy has struggled with a problem common throughout the Western world: declining political involvement among the population.

Political parties have found it increasingly difficult to recruit members, especially among the younger generation. The same is true of the popular movements like trade unions.

They nonetheless still play an important role in maintaining popular support for Swedish democracy.

A representative democracy, whose legislature is the Swedish Parliament (Riksdag), with 349 members in one chamber, Sweden holds parliamentary elections every four years.

After the 2002 election, the Social Democrats, with just under 40 percent of the votes, were able to form a minority government with the support of the Left Party (the ex-communists) and the Green Party. This signified a largely unchanged distribution of power compared to the previous four-year parliamentary term. The government consists of 22 ministers, of whom 10 are women.

The largest opposition party is the Moderates (formerly Conservatives), who suffered sharp losses in the 2002 election. The other non-socialist opposition parties are the Liberal, Christian Democrats and Center (formerly Agrarians).

After Sweden introduced women’s suffrage in 1921, efforts to promote gender equality have progressed further in many sectors of Swedish society, the report says.

One main principle of Swedish gender equality efforts is that everyone in the workforce, regardless of gender, should be able to live on their wages or salary and thus be independent of others.

For instance, to enable the parents of preschool children to keep their jobs, Sweden has an extensive system of publicly subsidized day care and the world’s most generous parental insurance system, allowing parents to saty at home with their children for 16 months with compensation for lost income. Two of these months of paid leave are mandatory “daddy months.”

Interestingly, the drive to improve the position of women in society has been an important driving force in the expansion of the Swedish welfare state.

The public sector has taken over a large proportion of responsibilities that once traditionally rested with women, mainly child and elder care. As a consequence of this policy Sweden has a very high percentage of women in the labor market — 74 percent, compared to 79 percent of men.

In the upper reaches of the national establishment, gender equality efforts have made major progress in politics and public administration; however, the private business elite still remains emphatically dominated by middle-aged men.

Citizens are protected by a whole set of laws and ordinances aimed at guaranteeing equal right, equal pay for the same work and prohibitions on discrimination and sexual harassment.

Many of these laws apply to the conditions in the labor market, with compliance being monitored by the Equal Opportunities Ombudsman.

Not only women are covered in efforts to promote equality. The country has very far-reaching legislation and practices aimed at banning discrimination and unfavorabale special treatment of people due to their ethnic background, physical or mental disabilities or sexual orientation. There are also laws aimed at ensuring the rights of children not only in society, but also in the family.

Welfare State

Sweden’s evolution as one of the world’s most envied welfare states had its roots in the 1930s, when it began to build up what then-Prme Minister Per Albin Hansson called “the home of the people” (folkhem).

Its vision was to lift Sweden out of poverty once and for all, and to build a society where all citizens, regardless of gender, class, social origins and other circumstances, would be guaranteed basic economic security by the public sector.

This Swedish “home of the people” would not be dependent on charity, but instead would be financed by a tax system in which the well-to-do would bear the main economic burden.

The principle was “from each according to ability, to each according to needs.” One of several labels for this social welfare structure was the “third way” — a narrow, previously untrodden path between capitalism and socialism.

The prosperity that Sweden built up during the 20th century, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, was distributed among the population in the form of large tax-financed systems of education, healthcare, child and elder care, parental insurance, pensions and various general allowances. The consequence has been a society with narrower economics gaps between the social classes than in comparable countries.

This classic welfare state has become known internationally as the “middle way,” the “third way” or the “Swedish model” - the latter expression originally describing the centralized negotiations between Swedish employers and the country’s strong unions, which secured crucial stability in the labor market for several decades as the welfare state expanded.

“The country that protects its citizens from the cradle to the grave” is yet another description of Sweden as the classic welfare state.