This is an opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter. The author is responsible for the opinions in the article.
While Social Democratic election workers prepare for the big launch day, the party leadership decides to act on two fronts.
On the one hand, spectacular statements are made in the media: in Expressen’s video blog, Reichstag member Ardalan Shekarabi says that S can imagine a government agreement with M, and Ida Karkiainen defends the party’s refusal to support a committee proposal by C, V and Mp to stop the deportation of single young people who lived with their families in Sweden but have turned 18.
On the other hand, Magdalena Andersson and Mikael Damberg give a press conference in which they present the party’s economic policy, a series of important proposals to make life in Sweden financially easier.
Parts of the party cheer, but there is despair in the larger social democratic movement. So are we now working on future government cooperation with M and Kd? Should we, in addition to our sadness at a series of new proposals: 13-year-olds in prison, misdemeanor laws, stopping track changes, now also despair at statements like Karkiainen’s that Sweden has a “debt to integration”? And that it makes it impossible for S to join the opposition in a committee statement aimed at stopping the deportation of 18-year-olds?
It also doesn’t help that the party is quick to explain, in posts on Facebook and emails to members, that it will certainly support the “valve” the Tidö government is preparing to save these 18-year-olds. The damage comes because we as party members have been bombarded with harsh rhetoric from our own representatives. It’s an unsustainable balancing act to first emphasize your own clarity externally and then communicate internally that we didn’t mean it that way.
The support within S for tougher immigration policies is based on a congressional resolution and Magdalena Andersson’s previous statements about “turning over every stone” in the fight against gang violence. The party leadership likes to say that this is the basis for a stable, legally secure and predictable policy that differs from that of the Tidö government. These are positive arguments in some ways, but they require social democratic integrity and clarity about where Sweden stands in 2026.
We have during the last For four years there was a government that attacked large parts of the rule of law, not only through increasingly tough migration, crime and penal policies, but also by portraying the country’s universities as bastions of left-wing revolutionary ideas, by axing aid money and by politicizing the Foreign Ministry. Why can’t social democracy recognize that inhumane deportations are part of the same policy?
The party leadership is in the midst of the most turbulent period Sweden has experienced since the interwar period. The social analysis is based on the hope that the culture war will end when everyone is in the middle. But it is called social democracy, and it is obligatory. The starting point of the political idea of social democracy is that the defense of democracy is the foundation of modern society. A number of other political ideologies are social but not democratic.
The party’s most important representative on integration policy issues, Lawen Redar, and the chairman of the Tiden think tank, Payam Moula, like to talk about the people’s home idea and the importance of the national community. But the boundaries of this community are becoming increasingly difficult to break through.
They are complete strangers for a radical social democratic heritage of ideas, which was also present in the Volksheim idea and was the social democracy’s answer to the Swedish Democrats of the time, namely the emerging National Socialism. Just like today, the 1920s and 1930s were a Sweden torn by fierce class antagonisms, conflicts over the nation’s image and a life-threatening outside world.
By defending the rightful place of the working class in the nation, social democracy became strong
The solution to this in the 20th century was not to target nationalists and Nazis. This was not about highlighting a set of Swedish values or good behavior. Rather, the emphasis was on cohesion, on “The good home knows neither guinea pigs nor stepchildren”.
By defending the rightful place of the working class in the nation, social democracy became strong. Therein lay a radical ideal of citizenship: citizenship was not primarily about ethnicity, but rather about political, economic and social belonging. Karleby and Wigforss stood next to Per Albin Hansson. They did not agree with a nationalism that involved the elimination of the foundations of the rule of law based on the idea of the unity of the nation.
Dear party, answer now to the question: Who are today’s Swedish stepchildren? Aren’t these the 18-year-olds who have been conditional Swedes all their lives and who we now want to throw out while at the same time telling their parents that they can stay as long as they work?
