No perks for Swedish Politicians. By Claudia Wallin.

Odd as it may sound to the many representatives of the people elsewhere, Sweden does not offer luxury or privileges to its politicians. Without official cars or private drivers, Swedish ministers and MPs travel in crowded buses and trains, just like the citizens they represent. Without any right to parliamentary immunity, they can be tried in a court of law like any other person. With no private secretaries at the door, their bare-bones parliamentary offices are as small as 8 [square meters]. …

Politicians who dare to spend public money on taxi journeys, instead of riding the train, end up on news headlines. Even the speaker of Parliament receives a card to use the public transportation. Only the prime minister has the right to use a car from the security forces on a permanent basis.

Swedish parliamentarians live in tiny apartments in the capital, where they wash and iron their own clothes in communal laundries. This may seem meagre for such eminent people, but it actually is much better than it used to be. Up until the end of the 1980s, all parliamentarians slept on sofa beds in their own offices. …

 

 

The take-home pay of a member of the Riksdag (Parliament) is about two times more than that of an elementary school teacher. …

I still remember the strange feeling of witnessing an extraterrestrial phenomenon when I saw the Swedish minister of foreign affairs and the prime minister pushing a shopping trolley in a supermarket in Stockholm. Or the mayor of Stockholm standing in a queue at a bus stop. Or the speaker of the Parliament sitting in an underground train. …

Those in authority must be held accountable, and all information must be freely available to the public: Swedish openness is reflected in the very transparency of political power, which is monitored by means of the oldest transparency law in the world — a law that makes political corruption at national level a rare phenomenon in the country.

Imagine if one of the main political parties here said it would set the salaries of politicians and federal bureaucrats as multiples of the average wage. For example, the prime minister might get paid five times the average wage, senior bureaucrats might get double the average wage, and entry-level bureaucrats might get half the average wage.

That party would win the next election in a landslide. And I’ll bet the average wage would soon rise 🙂