Muharrem Demirok’s Center party vacillates between right and left in politics – but the direction is away from the Tidö parties. And the newly elected party chairman is now doing his best to build a strong position in his party after a weak start. At the recently started Center meeting in Örebro, he was generously welcomed by the party members into the heat. But the cheers will die down unless the polls turn around within a year or so.
“There is an Annie-shaped hole in the middle of the Center Party,” an experienced party representative told me in the corridors of the meeting. The hole is now to be filled by a former municipal councilor from Linköping, who started against serious headwinds. His recipe for success is largely copied from the party’s election analysis and at the meeting we get to see it put into practice.
The election analysis determined that the Center lacked clarity, both in matters of substance and in the matter of government, and Demirok has taken this to heart.
“A careful but unequivocal step to the left”
First the substantive issues: He has come forward to the meeting with a new school policy that takes a careful but unequivocal step to the left in terms of profit withdrawal (to be stopped if schools have quality deficiencies) and school choice (to be made mandatory and queues not to be allowed). And in the debate at the meeting it was noticed that the party is open to this. On some issues, the meeting even wants to go beyond the party leadership, while other changes will push forward liberal phantom pains in parts of the party.
Since the government question: Here, in just one week, Demirok has gone from promising an announcement in good time for the next election – to now stating that Magdalena Andersson is his “most suitable” candidate for prime minister, and to a large extent it is probably a matter of a deeply felt distancing from the government’s concessions to the Sweden Democrats’ political conservatism. The Tidö agreement has given the Center more political reasons to turn left.
“Today the Center leader clearly distanced himself”
So in today’s general meeting, the Center leader clearly distanced himself from his former alliance colleagues and highlighted former party leader Karin Söder as a kind of spiritual role model. She was foreign minister and social minister in the Center-led governments of the 70s, she introduced Saturday closing at Systembolaget, and created the multi-child allowance. A stroke for social welfare policy that can also be seen as a positioning in politics for those who like to chase the slightly more discreet political signals in a speech.
The Annie-shaped hole must therefore be filled with a policy that moves to the left of the political center, at least in the school issue. Whether Demirok’s choice of course holds up will be decided in the long run by the opinion figures. His position is weak, but right now it is clear that the party wants to give him a chance. However, they won’t give him much more than a year.