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Eclectic Medley. In his first year as Prime Minister, Palme made an instant name for himself on the international circuit. But his standing on the home front needed bolstering, and he knew that. During the campaign, Palme left his housing-development bungalow before 8 a.m. (in egalitarian Sweden, Prime Ministers do not have an official residence), and zipped through the rush-hour traffic in his Volkswagen minibus without a police escort. Usually he headed for a factory or a construction project, where he would converse with the workers while a tape recorder in the bus ran through an eclectic medley of theme songs: the Internationale, We Shall Overcome, a Cuban freedom song, an Israeli chant and The Ballad of Joe Hill, which commemorates a Swedish-born Wobbly executed in Utah in 1915 for murdering a grocer.
The Communists, whose program is always tailored to the special concerns of affluent Swedish society (one year, they campaigned for two homes per family), bore down hard on Palme's efforts to link Sweden with the Common Market. But it was the Center Party that carved out the largest hunk of opposition votes. Hammering away at the issues of inflation and law-and-order, they polled 20% of the total. Two other centrist and conservative parties account for the balance.
Though Palme will plainly need Communist cooperation for his programs, he rejects the notion of a formal coalition. During the election, he was rough on his Communist opponents. "They'll stick a knife in your back," he warned during a speech to Stockholm construction workers, many of them Communists. "We will not govern with Communist support. If they want to overturn a labor government, var sa goda—let them help themselves." Despite his words, the Communists are expected to work with Palme's Social Democrats. The alternative, after all, is a far more conservative government.
Sweden's Social Democrats have ruled with Communist help before—from 1957 until 1968, when they won an absolute parliamentary majority. The fact remains, however, that Palme and his party will now be compelled to operate far more carefully than in the past two years. The Communists are expected to fight him on the Common Market grounds, the conservative opposition on domestic issues, since they blame him and his party for the country's internal ills. Asked whether his government's authority had been weakened somewhat by the voting, Palme replied: "Very little. Very little." But a little, nonetheless.
YUGOSLAVIA
Collectivizing the Presidency
Despite Yugoslavia's surprisingly free intellectual climate, one subject has long remained taboo: public speculation about the retirement of President Josip Broz Tito, 78. Last week Tito broke the taboo. During a routine speech to party officials in Zagreb, Tito suddenly, perhaps impulsively, said: "I have been in this post quite long enough, and I would like to have more possibilities to work on some other project. I am taking the initiative in this matter myself, because if someone else did it, it would look as if he wanted to get rid of me."