How Sweden lost its soul – and stopped being Sweden | Martin Gelin

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.

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.

---

A string 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.

after newsletter promotion

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.

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 conservativepolitician 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.

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