The cycle in Scandinavia seems to have played out rather differently. The social-democrats (at the time considerably more socialist than they are today) were mostly elected in the 1930s and '40s, when the countries were extremely unequal, with a lot of poor farmers and factory workers and a small aristocratic class. They implemented a sort of welfare-state capitalism, and the countries prospered after WW2, during a period of almost unbroken left-wing rule.

Only after the countries became prosperous, now there has been a political turn moderately to the right and towards some expansion of free-market policies and privatization (Denmark's particular version is called "flexicurity").