The last couple of days have been very interesting from the perspective of the political power of blogging. Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister since last October, have recently after some time of blog silence picked up blogging again. Now he blogs in Swedish and started to use the blog for telling people of his whereabouts and thoughts in a bit more cautious way than his previous blogging years when he didn’t have a political position. He is quite successful and since the start in January he have had more than 250.000 hits.
Part from that he is technological savvy, he is also a complicated political figure partly because of his high profile background as a former Swedish prime minister and later a national hero as a mediator and diplomat in different positions around the conflict at the Balkans, partly because he had a number of other involvements prior is current position, which he have been criticized for. The reason is that some of these is believed by some to be in conflict with his current position.
The interesting things started a couple of weeks ago when Bildt began to use his blog for commenting directly on some of the critique he received from media. At first the media was silent, but the last couple of days something interesting seems to be happening.
At least two journalists have already written articles about how Bildt’s blogging is a threat to democracy along the lines that there is a danger to allow a foreign minister to talk directly to the people without being questioned (i e without being filtered by the media). A former editor in chief for a major national newspaper even compared Bildt to Hugo Chavez! A comparison which is “interesting” to say the least. You can read his article in Swedish here: “Utrikesministern pratar för mycket på bloggen”.
Another journalist compared Bildt blogging to Nixon’s Checkers speech (also in Swedish). I will try to translate two sentences from that article to English so you will understand the tone:
En bloggande utrikesminister kan tyckas vara ett behjärtansvärt uttryck för vilja till öppenhet och demokratisk delaktighet. Men samtidigt bör man kanske komma ihåg att drömmen om direkt och oförmedlad kommunikation mellan ledare och folk framförallt har odlats i andra politiska traditioner än den liberala demokratins.
A blogging foreign minister may seem to be a deserving expression for an urge to openness and democratic participation. But at the same time one should maybe remember that the dream about direct and unintermediated communication between leader and people foremost have been grown in other political traditions than the liberal democracy.
The last number of days Bildt’s blog have had more than 50.000 visitors and the Swedish blogosphere is boiling. It is really interesting to see when journalists are showing another color that usual and I maybe we just have seen the prolog to something big here.
