Jennifer The big election day was the weekend before last— we had a few other things on our minds so didn't pay too much attention at the time I'm afraid— but I did get into town to take some pictures of the campaigning and the little huts ("
valstugor") that each political party had put up to be a center point for distributing literature, have rallies, etc. The huts were set up in the main square in town (the one that the buses don't go through just at the moment!). They split themselves up neatly and by color coding: the left-leaning (Rödgröna, the'redgreens') parties on one side, the center/right folks (The Alliance, the 'blues') on the other side. Rödgröna are what you might expect: the communists, the social democrats, and the environmentalists (although the greens do not always hold with the reds in voting). Joining the redgreens were Sweden's famous
Piratpartiet, the Pirate Party, who value freedom of expression and bandwidth above all and
appear to have claimed purple as their color.
We have been learning about politics in Swedish class for the last month of course, and I did a small presentation on
Feministisk Initiativ, the Feminist Party (the 'pinks', I guess) and their charismatic leader Gudrun Schyman, who's fun. They aren't really a political party yet, as they have not gotten enough votes for a member of parliament, and they don't have an . But I went to the Uppsala rally, where I got a couple balloons and a button right off the lapel of our local candidate. "Please vote for us," she said, "even if we don't get a seat in Parliament, if we get just 1%, we can have a real election hut next year!"
someone cast a write-in vote for a sql injection. you guys have some seriously geeky elections.
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