How
Sweden lost its soul – and stopped being Sweden
In 2022,
my country entered a new era of cruelty. It will take more than one election to
get the old, tolerant Sweden back
Fri 11
Sep 2026 06.00 CEST
Last
year, a baby named Emanuel was born in Sweden. Before his first birthday, his
parents were told that Emanuel could no longer stay in the country. The
department of migration ordered his
removal, alone, to Iran – despite the ongoing war.
Emanuel’s
parents were legally in the country. They had Swedish residency permits, but
the laws that allowed them to stay were tightened after the baby’s birth, and
the family got sucked into a Kafkaesque maze of official hurdles, designed to
limit migration to Sweden.
Raif is a
four-year-old boy with autism, who still wears nappies and is unable to
talk. This spring, he was informed that he would be deported alone. Raif’s case
attracted significant media
coverage and the authorities eventually reversed the decision.
But the
number of absurd, hardline calls from the migration department just keeps
piling up. A
74-year-old British man with dementia was told to leave the country after
25 years. Another
British man, on a generous World Bank retirement pension, was also told he
was not welcome in Sweden because retirement money does not count as salary for
the purposes of new income thresholds for migrants.
The
young, the old, vulnerable people, the wealthy: all are the target of harsh and
often aggressive immigration policies. And Sweden’s leaders remain unyielding.
“We cannot adjust the law based on each and every personal fate,” Ulf
Kristersson, the prime minister, said, commenting on a series of hardline
immigration decisions involving children.
Election posters of Swedish Prime Minister and Moderate Party leader Ulf
Kristersson in Stockholm Photograph: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
Swedes
vote in a general election on Sunday 13 September and, according to opinion
polls, the centre-left opposition has a slight lead. But even if there is a
change of government, many previously unthinkable far-right ideas are now
comfortably embedded in the mainstream of Swedish politics. The past four years
have been characterised by an astonishing acceptance of ethnonationalist views,
xenophobic rhetoric and authoritarian policies, increasingly targeting
children. And many of these ideas have been absorbed and appropriated by the
centre-left opposition Social Democrats.
Not even
the deportation of toddlers or the alarming new shift in judicial policy to
build prisons for teenagers as young as 14, are too much of a moral red line,
it seems.
The story
of the transformation that now blights Sweden goes back to 2022, when the
conservative bloc won that year’s Swedish general election, but only with a
tiny margin. The Tidö
agreement struck that December, between the three conservative parties
(Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals) and the far-right Sweden
Democrats meant a minority government could be formed. But this formal pact
breached the mainstream’s cordon sanitaire against cooperating with the
radical right. It also launched an attempt to redefine modern Sweden, marking
profound policy shifts on immigration, crime, climate and energy, schools and
healthcare.
Establishment
conservatives defended the accord on the grounds that it would blunt the impact
of the Sweden Democrats, whose support had been growing since 2015. Instead, it
in effect passed the torch of conservative leadership to the far right, giving
the Sweden Democrats no ministerial jobs but extraordinary power to shape
policy.
As a
Swede who lived in the US for two decades, I was reluctant to admit that my
birth country had changed. I brushed away alarming anecdotes as isolated cases,
or a brief departure from the status quo. Surely, Sweden would remain itself,
guided by the progressive, egalitarian and humanitarian ideals that defined the
country and its public life – at least on the surface – when I was growing up.
But in
the last four years the Overton window of acceptable debate has shifted
radically to the right.
A new
Sweden has emerged, cruel and cold for migrants, including highly skilled
employees of research institutions, universities, tech and medical companies –
who have been stunned to learn that they are no longer welcome to work in a
country where they have lived for years, sometimes decades.
Only 15%
of Swedes approve of Donald Trump. And yet ideas quite similar to Trump’s
ethnonationalism now define much of contemporary Swedish politics, and are
challenging our democratic foundations. The Swedish Institute for Human Rights,
an independent government agency, claims that Sweden is increasingly shaped by
growing acceptance of xenophobic views, hate crimes and by punitive policies
directed at children. In its 2026 annual
report it expresses “serious concern” over an erosion
of human rights in Sweden.
The legal
watchdog Civil
Rights Defenders also claims that a shift has taken place, where the
government no longer talks about rights, but about control. Ministers have
entwined migration with crime, and increasingly depict citizens, even children,
as problems, risks and costs.
If this
authoritarian turn can be widely accepted so quickly in Sweden, where the
democratic and humanitarian foundations were until recently solid, it can
happen anywhere.
Astring
of scandals in the final sprint of the election campaign has not been kind to
the far right. Expo, a Swedish magazine that monitors far-right extremism, reported
that one of the most influential ideologues in the Sweden Democrats, Gustav
Gellerbrant, lives with a partner – who also works for the party – and is
alleged to have deep ties to Russian influence operations. Gellerbrant was one
of the architects of the Tidö agreement and sits in the Sweden Democrats’
coordinating office within the government. He has been placed on paid leave
following the reports but Peter Hultqvist, a Social Democrat former defence
minister, called the matter a “security crisis” for Sweden that “goes right
into the prime minister’s own office”.
Gellerbrant
himself was unapologetic, denouncing what he called a media “witch-hunt” – a
Trumpian strategy that has also become the new default whenever scandals
envelop the Swedish far right.
If the
rightwing coalition loses the election, it is also prepared to find a
scapegoat: Muslim voters. Over the past few months, influential rightwing
pundits have lined up to suggest that the left is mobilising Muslims to vote
them out. A writer for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet recently referred
elsewhere to a reported increase in early voting in immigrant-majority suburbs
as “the cattle” being herded by leftwing parties.
In just a
few years, conservatives have distanced themselves from their two most recent
prime ministers, Fredrik Reinfeldt and Carl Bildt, who advocated a more
inclusive, centre-right liberalism. In the government’s “cultural
canon” – originally a strange nationalist initiative promoted by the far
right – the authors mock Reinfeldt for his pro-immigration views and blame his
“internationalist” agenda for most of Sweden’s contemporary problems. The
cultural canon, a list of the references and ideas that supposedly define
Swedishness excludes all works from the multicultural Sweden that has emerged
since 1975 – meaning we get Ingmar Bergman, Ikea, Pippi Longstocking and the
Viggen fighter jet, but nothing made by my generation, the most diverse in
Swedish history.
Bibi
Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona. Bergman
features on the government’s ‘cultural canon’ Photograph: United
Artists/Allstar
The
conservatives have imported the most toxic tropes of the US culture wars in a
populist performance of such intensity that it has become internalised on the
right, and normalised by the media. Now when a conservative politician in
Lidingö, the wealthiest suburb of Stockholm, calls
for a ban on “strange Peruvian fish stews” in the school cafeterias, it
barely makes the headlines.
This
embrace of rightwing populism has also led to a departure from Sweden’s
ambitious climate politics and a general turn away from scientific consensus.
Johan Rockström, a climate scientist, last year told me that he had been
invited by every government in Sweden in the past few decades, left or right,
to share his
research on planetary boundaries, but the current government was the
exception – they have not reached out a single time.
The
government increasingly ignores advisory bodies that are supposed to weigh in
on any legislation or proposals. This is most evident when it comes to
authoritarian crime policies. New bills have repeatedly been passed against the
advice of experts, criminologists and social scientists, who warn against
imposing ever-harsher punishments on children.
What we
are seeing is a fundamental challenge to the Swedish tradition of pragmatism.
The small
but persistent lead for the opposition in election polls may suggest that the
tide is turning, and that there is still an underpinning of humanitarian ideals
grounding Swedish voters. Recently, the billionaire Roger Akelius, who used to
vote conservative, said
he would not vote for the rightwing coalition in this election. “Sweden
can’t build a future on isolation and prisons,” he said.
A row of
posters for the Social Democrats, featuring party leader Magdalena Andersson,
in Stockholm, September 6, 2026. Photograph: Tom Little/Reuters
But the
opposition struggles to articulate a clear ideological alternative, preferring
a painfully cautious campaign similar to Denmark’s Social Democrats or the UK
Labour party as it was under Keir Starmer. There is a clear risk in taking no
risks. Relying only on carefully poll-tested centrist positions has not worked
for European progressives as the political landscape shifts towards
anti-establishment ideas and fury at the status quo. The tight polls suggest
that millions of Swedes still consider prisons and isolation the future.
Eight
years ago, the conservative prime minister Ulf Kristersson promised
a Holocaust survivor he would never form a government with the far right.
“My
values are not those of the Sweden Democrats,” he said in an interview.
“I will not cooperate, engage in dialogue, collaborate, or form a coalition
government with the Sweden Democrats.”
Now
Kristersson is promising the far right cabinet positions.
The
Sweden Democrats have not changed in those years. But Sweden certainly has.
- Martin Gelin writes for the
Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário