This is an opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter. The author is responsible for the opinions in the article.
Who are today’s Swedish stepchildren? Jenny Andersson asks that in DN (6/2).
There are hundreds of thousands of children and young people growing up in endangered areas. Those who, in Nicolas Lunabba’s words, “face a future that collapses them, destroys their dreams and ambitions, their self-esteem and their bodies.”
Children or young people who have not misbehaved should not be expelled. We also do not pay return migration allowances to integrated people. Right-wing nationalism must be fought.
But the point in Andersson’s text is aimed at the renewal of social democracy: a tougher criminal policy, a more restrictive migration policy and an offensive against parallel societies.
For Andersson, this is a mistake. Instead, social democracy should return to the 1920s and the idea of a people’s homeland.
But what was the lesson of the 1920s?
Political scientist Sheri Berman points to two key success factors. One of these was the primacy of politics: the idea that democracy should prevail over markets and capital interests. The second was community – the public home as a social, moral and political project.
But along somewhere Along the way, these ideals were abandoned. It is these tensions that we see in today’s social democracy.
A libertarian left emerged that believes that the individual should be protected from the state – and that the interest of the collective, the homeland of the people, must never take precedence over the rights of the individual. They consider the labor movement’s ideals of decency to be outdated. But a democracy without authority and control collapses. Politics without violence becomes symbolic.
In 2024, EIA property management presented an elevator for Rosengård based on residents’ wishes. Leisure activities, homework help, youth jobs.
But there was something else.
Surveillance cameras. Drug dogs in public areas. Tagging system and sensors. Fines for those who misbehave. Prohibition of outsiders “staying” in stairwells.
This was not what the politicians demanded. It was the parents’.
This is what home care looks like when formulated by the residents.
In a good home there are no bastards or stepchildren. And in my Sweden there are no endangered areas.
Read more about refugee policy in DN.
