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This is a leading chronicle. Eskilstuna-Kuriren is a liberal newspaper.
Nyamko Sabuni will soon celebrate a year as party leader for the Liberals. Shortly before being elected at the party’s national meeting, we wrote on the leader’s site about relationships and money in her election campaign. The questions that hung in the air were those that had contributed to the campaign with money and services.
Why was it important? Basically for the same reason that it is desirable to be transparent about, for example, the contributions of the parties, a principle on which there is now broad agreement. Those who lose weight can sometimes influence. The best way to prevent such influence from becoming inappropriate is to let everyone see who pays whom.
Since Sabuni’s election campaign was long and apparently luxurious, it was particularly interesting to shed light on money. But not only why. The dual role of former party secretary Johan Jakobsson as a key person in Sabuni’s campaign and co-owner of Nordic Public Affairs raised an additional question mark. The agency works with impact work aimed at the policy of clients who remain hidden.
But the party did not require any accounting. Taxpayers have remained essentially unknown. Over the days, however, Svenska Dagbladet has told more about the relationships between Jakobsson, his agency (which he left earlier this year) with clients and people in the leadership of the Liberal Party.
The magazine describes Jakobsson’s part in the Sabuni campaign and how Nordic public affairs working for the vehicle maker Scania became the policy of the Liberals. This is Sabuni’s first departure as party leader: a state commission to switch traffic from freight to electricity, a requirement that the January parties later made to Swedish politics.
According to SvD sources, there was a Nordic Palestinian Authority mission also behind the decision by moderates and Christian Democrats to abandon the energy deal, which the liberals had previously been out on.
This policy in itself is no stranger to the liberals who for a long time, and with increasingly strong climatic reasons, pushed for better conditions for nuclear energy.
Nyamko Sabuni’s advocate also reiterates that there is nothing wrong with politicians listening to business. It is shuffling the cards. Most people want a business that works well as a basis for prosperity and democracy. All politicians need to know the reality that companies face.
But economic, labor market and all other policies refer to conflicts of objectives and interests. Business is not a monolith that politicians can choose to listen to or not listen to. Instead, they are a large number of unclassified actors and special interests, industry organizations but also individual companies, each with its own agenda. It may coincide with a party, but it is often based on things like claiming government subsidies, earning tax benefits, or staying away from competitors. Not least, adaptation to climate change is full of the kind of fight between different interests with a lot of money in the pot.
To understand this environment and the various agendas, politicians must listen to lobbyists. But they should do it on their own terms and with full openness, not the other way around, helping the impact work to stay out of the public light.
Unfortunately, in many places this is the case. Where a common path is the secret tasks for lobbyists who, for example, write policy documents, parliamentary motions, and debate articles for politicians.
Liberals around Sabuni are now among those who have taken this a step further. Some special interests have received a channel of their own for at least some members of the party leadership, through a person and a lobbying firm that played a major role on the path of the party leader to the position of party leader and where Funding for the campaign has been kept secret.
If the liberals want to shed light on this, as they should, the party does not have to invent the wheel. Liberals have a mechanism to deal with issues like these, in the form of ethical guidelines and an ethics committee.
Among other things, the Ethical Guidelines for Candidates, Elected Officials and Liberal Employees say “they must act so that political conduct is not suspected of being affected by irrelevant considerations.”
That deed was included in the Ethics Committee’s assessment of corporate governance positions by European MP Cecilia Wikström and forced her to resign as a candidate in the European Parliament elections last year.
This side of leadership felt that the decision was wrong. However, there is a level for what liberals accept in terms of their top elected representatives’ relationships with financial interests. It should be noted that, in the Wikström case, even remotely it had no suspicious impact on his work in political affairs, while his financial compensation for the board’s assignments remained open.
The least the party should ask Nyamko Sabuni to fully disclose is the money and other services she received during her party leadership campaign.
