What happens when you take benefits one step too far?

A brief view of the Swedish political system, and more specifically the Social Democrats, during the last century and why they're at the end of the line.

Sometimes, being in a position of power for such a long time as the Social Democrats of Sweden have been you start to become the system. You start seeing yourself as the one and only rightful ruler without whom the country would fall to pieces. You're able to change the laws to favour you and yours when needed. Then, you're starting to get sloppy. You take things for granted, such as giving every loyal old S-person a nice position to retire at. At first it's hardly noticeable, but a few years down the road you've accumulated so much "benefits" for your top people it's starting to have an impact on the rest of the organisation. More and more people want this safety without having to put in the hard-working hours, just stay loyal to the party and things'll go their way.

Things really starts to erupt when some high-profile person running an important department are showing signs of carelessness. What are the party to do with him?

Kick him out and other people in the party behaving in the same way will surely get agitated and check their backs. This will tear the party down from the inside out. Let him continue and pretend like nothing's wrong will just make the public annoyed and enough of these events will have devastating effects on the public opinion.

The only thing left to do with an old loyalist like that is to transfer him to a less visible position inside the same organisation. Do that enough times and you have the Social Democrats of today. An organisation that is so corrupt it struggles to even pretend to hide all their violation of the Swedish law.

The last few weeks have shown the beginning of their downfall. Several big leaks have surfaced that shows carelessness and corruption all the way to the top and I believe this is just the beginning of an avalanche of evidence of their incompetence. If you've been following it closely you might have noticed that people from all parts of the government are behaving the exact same way. Classified information saved in unencrypted documents, readily available to a lot of people. All you need is one person willing to share this information to the press and another scandal is a fact.