Linda Snecker becomes a lobbyist for big finance – voters demand exclusion from V

Published December 29, 2024 at 10:52 a.m.

Inrikes. Former MP Linda Snecker (V) becomes a lobbyist for Rud Pedersen, a PR giant who sells politics to, among other things, the independent school industry, big finance and the arms industry. Now party colleagues are demanding that she be expelled from the Left Party.

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Snecker left the Riksdag early last fall after ten years and is now a heavy lobbyist for Rud Pedersen's Swedish department.

According to the newspaper Flamman, Snecker claims that she will work with “infrastructure, digitalization and energy”.

Many left-wing party members have been angered by Snecker's career change and are demanding that she be expelled from the party.

“Either the Left Party excludes Linda Snecker, who is becoming a lobbyist for Rud Pedersen to sell her contacts within the Left Party, or the party leadership is free to become part of the scum. The Left Party must confess its color: are you defending your principles or your friends?”, says an internal petition that has collected just over 1,600 signatures.

Went to elections on a ban
The Left Party went to elections in the EU Parliament on, among other things, introducing transitional rules for three years. The internal criticism is therefore partly based on the fact that the party is not living up to its teachings.

“Snecker is selling his contacts with the Left Party as a consultant and now the Left Party must show that these contacts are worthless,” the petition states, among other things.

The initiators demand that this be done partly by the party expelling Snecker, partly by the Left Party parliamentary group signing an assurance that no one will let her lobby against them, and partly by including a ban on switching to the lobbying industry for commercial vested interests in the party's candidate declarations.

“If the Left Party is not clear, they risk ending up in the same position as the Green Party. That party is also strongly critical of lobbying, but the lobbyists have become so numerous that they are an internal democratic problem. It is unpleasant for politicians to have to ask themselves whether a member is pushing an issue out of conviction or because it is part of their work. A former spokesperson (Maria Wetterstrand, FT's note) who works as a lobbyist, for example, is pushing to weaken environmental legislation regarding mines,” the initiators write.