Sweden’s Palme Likens His Foes on Right to Thatcher

Socialist Prime Minister Olof Palme, bolstered by the results of a final poll, ended the Swedish election campaign Saturday by attacking the policies of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as much as those of his own conservative opponents.

If the poll is correct, Sweden’s 6.4 million voters will once again endorse their welfare state today and keep Palme, 58, and his Social Democratic Labor Party in power. But the margin is expected to be very narrow.

The welfare state, probably the most extensive in any Western democracy, was a significant issue in the campaign. Its cost takes half the salary of an average wage earner. Yet its benefits are so pervasive that few Swedes want to give them up. More than half the voters, in fact, are completely dependent on the government for their salaries or welfare benefits.

Palme, in an outdoor meeting on a chilly day in a suburb of Goteborg, Sweden’s second-largest city, lumped his conservative opponents with Thatcher, insisting that they are intent on applying her rigid free-enterprise policies to Sweden.

Recalling the British soccer fans from Liverpool whose violent outburst at an international match in Brussels led to 38 deaths in May, Palme blamed part of the problem on Britain’s high unemployment.

“They came from a city with tremendous unemployment, a city where the state does nothing for the unemployed,” Palme said, reminding his followers that Sweden has an official unemployment rate of only 3%, one of the lowest in Europe, while British joblessness is 13% nationally and higher in the industrial cities.

“We cannot hand over the welfare state to a group of conservative parties that cannot agree on what to do with it,” Palme said.

His implication that the conservatives might dismantle the welfare state would be denied by the opposition, which did not try to do so when it was in power from 1976 to 1982.

According to a survey released Friday by a respected private polling organization, the Social Democratic Labor Party, with a projected 45.3% of the vote, and the Communists, with 4.8%, would combine for a total vote on the left of 50.1%-- enough to give Palme a majority of the seats in Parliament.