Something slightly more modest this time, namely another instalment of Annals from Swedish Electoral Cartography.
The 1966 local elections were, perhaps, the most significant ones in the history of the country. The general elections of 1964 had seen the standard of non-socialist cooperation raised for the first time, as Bertil Rubin founded
Medborgerlig Samling (which, yes, the microparty that
@Makemakean keeps going on about is almost certainly named for) as a platform for joint lists, secured the support of
Sydsvenskan and a few other Malmö-based groups, and only succeeded in creating a fourth right-wing list in the Malmö-Lund-Helsingborg-Landskrona constituency that won three seats.
The time was clearly not ripe for a general alliance, but soon enough, the Liberals and Centre began talking, and announced that for the 1966 local elections they would be supporting the creation of joint lists wherever their local parties could agree on such, under the name
Mittensamverkan ("Centre Cooperation" or something like that - note the distinction between
mitten meaning centrism in general and
center as in the Centre Party here). The Conservatives were invited to participate in some cases, in others not, and this resulted in something of a mess - we can comfortably piece together the partisan composition of councils elected in 1966 because the SCB added a section tracking that, but there's no good way to calculate voteshares.
The 1966 local elections were the first time SR trialled its new approach to journalism. Previously, political interviews had been treated as an opportunity for politicians to speak freely about their policies, and interviewers were generally convivial and forgiving toward their subjects. No more. This time, interviews of party leaders were conducted by the "three Os", Åke Ortmark, Lars Orup and Gustaf Olivecrona, who spared no punches, withheld no embarrassing questions and pressed the leaders for answers. This caught most of the political scene off guard, but none quite as much as Prime Minister Erlander, who was coming up on his twenty-year mark as head of government. Where he had been friendly, masterly and agreeable for as much as he was seen on TV at all, Erlander found himself stumbling at the questions asked of him. Particularly so regarding the housing question, which was getting worse and worse in the major cities especially. His inability to provide a clear solution hurt the Social Democrats, and nowhere more than in the major cities - they lost control of Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uppsala, Jönköping, and a number of other cities.
In total, the Social Democratic net losses amounted to 3,056. But this is a misleading figure by itself - the country was, of course, midway through a local government reform at the time - the block municipalities were created in 1964, and encouraged to merge at their own pace. A few had done so by these elections, in others the process had yet to start, and others still were partway through the mergers, creating a patchwork map.
Malmö fell into the latter category, and technically still does so today. It had been placed in a large block covering the municipalities of Oxie, Bunkeflo, Svedala, Bara, Burlöv and parts of Staffanstorp. By 1966, Oxie had finalised merger negotiations and been placed into the first (northern and eastern) constituency for Malmö City Council. Bunkeflo merged in 1970, and from there on negotiations stalled. The other three municipalities were uninterested in joining, and Bara and Svedala would eventually merge (not without resistance on the former's part) while Burlöv remains intact, the second-smallest municipality in Sweden by land area.
So it was a changing city that went to vote in 1966, and in more ways than one. The harbour shoreline was further out than it had ever been, but not as far as today. The housing estates that dominate the east and south of the city (and from one of which I'm currently writing this) were partway built, and the shift in voting habits partway finished with it. The Social Democrats had ruled the city since 1918, the first election held under universal suffrage, and the cracks were beginning to show even as the shipyards and factories showed record profits and the only underperforming business seemed to be the unemployment offices.
Malmö was where MBS had been born, and its local Conservative party had been cheering it on, in sharp contrast to their more hardline brothers in Stockholm and elsewhere. They got along swimmingly with the Liberals - if anything, it was
Liberal reticence that prevented MBS from properly being implemented in 1964 - and Malmö, as with the other Scanian cities, saw the creation of a broad right-wing unity list called
Samling i Malmö ("Malmö Coalition" or something). Well, in Malmö it wasn't quite a perfect union, because there was
also a Liberal-Centre unity list under the
Mittensamverkan name. Just to make things perfectly confusing. The SCB file notes that both members elected off this list were Centre Party members, which makes them the first such ever elected in Malmö.
It gets harder to divide the SiM seats, but I've made a completely arbitrary division that's probably no wronger than any other guess - I'll see if I can shake down a membership list sometime.
Anyway, Malmö was one of few cities where the Social Democrats pointedly did
not lose power in 1966. Perhaps because the city was expanding rapidly, perhaps because the industrial crisis was still ten years away. In any case it hardly mattered, because Malmö, like all municipalities outside Stockholm and possibly Gothenburg, used a Proporz system to divide municipal government posts. I mentioned the local Conservatives and Social Democrats were chummy - well, after a spirited campaign aimed at displacing the Social Democrats that failed, the fifteen Conservatives elected to the council went right back to cooperating with them in governing the city. Majoritarian government, too, would be another ten years in the making, although who knows what might have happened if SiM had won another three seats and gotten to govern the city.