No proposal was presented during Thursday morning’s meeting with the speaker of parliament, and no further meetings have been scheduled.
"As it looks now, a solution is very far off," Samuel Gonzales Westling, group leader for the Left Party, told the TT newswire.
The chaos was sparked by the far-right Sweden Democrats defeating the opposition on April 29th by sending two MPs to vote whom they had promised to withhold, leading to opposition accusations of cheating, as The Local was first to report.
Because of the additional MPs, the opposition's bid to add transitional rules to the government's citizenship bill failed, when it otherwise had a majority in parliament and would have succeeded.
The Sweden Democrats' decision to let the two MPs vote shattered the parliament's long-standing pairing system, called kvittning, under which parties agree to hold back MPs from voting to balance out MPs from the opposing side who are sick or who have other engagements.
The failure to find a solution means that every MP for a government party will continue to have to be present for votes in the parliament chamber to ensure that the bills the government wants to pass succeed.
"My brief comment is that today's meeting did not lead to – and perhaps no one expected it to – any new pairing system,"the Social Democrats' group leader Lena Hallengren, who left the meeting with the speaker early, told TT.
She said that it is fundamentally a matter of trust.
"If I, as the Social Democrat group leader, am to tell a Social Democrat who is actually here, healthy, and ready to vote, that 'you aren't allowed to vote because another party has removed someone', then there must be trust that the system works."
Demand for an apology
The meeting concluded without any proposal being presented, according to Gonzales Westling, who noted that no additional meetings are currently on the calendar.
"The feeling I got was that they didn't want to find an agreement."
The opposition is also demanding an apology from the Sweden Democrats, but according to Green Party group leader Annika Hirvonen, that demand seems to be falling on deaf ears.
"It is a total deadlock. When not even the Moderates and Christian Democrats can acknowledge that the Sweden Democrats broke the agreement, we remain very far apart in our description of reality and our view of what a contract means," Hirvonen told TT, adding that the Liberals did not participate in the meeting.
Centre Party group leader Daniel Bäckström argued that the Sweden Democrats have been clear that the party does not believe it did anything wrong – and would do the same thing again.
"There is no confidence or trust that this won't happen again. And that is where we stand."
Avoiding journalists
Representatives for the Tidö parties – the government plus the Sweden Democrats – stated on Wednesday that they want to see a new pairing system that also takes independents – members of parliament who have left their parties during the term – into account.
The group leaders of the Tidö parties did not speak with the media as they entered the meeting.
Separately, the Social Insurance Committee met on Thursday to discuss the opposition's bid for a new vote on adding transitional provisions to the recently passed citizenship law. We'll let you know as soon as we hear anything about how it went.
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