Last year, a baby named Emanuel was born in Sweden. Before his first birthday, his parents were told he could no longer stay in the country. The migration department ordered that he be sent alone to Iran, despite the ongoing war there.
Emanuel’s parents were in the country legally. They had Swedish residency permits, but the laws that allowed them to stay were tightened after the baby was born, and the family got caught in 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 cannot talk. This spring, he was told he would be deported alone. Raif’s case got significant media coverage, and the authorities eventually reversed the decision.
But the number of absurd, hardline decisions from the migration department keeps growing. A 74-year-old British man with dementia was told to leave the country after 25 years. Another British man, with a generous World Bank retirement pension, was also told he was not welcome to live permanently in Sweden because retirement money does not count as salary under the new income thresholds for migrants.
The young, the old, vulnerable people, the wealthy: all are targets 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,” said Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, commenting on a series of hardline immigration decisions involving children.
View image in fullscreenElection 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 marked by an astonishing acceptance of ethnonationalist views, xenophobic rhetoric and authoritarian policies, increasingly targeting children. And many of these ideas have been absorbed and adopted 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 seem to be too much of a moral red line.
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 by 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 effectively 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, unUniversities, 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. 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. Skip past newsletter promotion Free newsletter | Weekly Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment Enter your email Sign up After newsletter promotion View image in fullscreen 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 wealIn a wealthy suburb of Stockholm, a call to ban “strange Peruvian fish stews” from school cafeterias barely makes the news. This embrace of right-wing populism has also led to a departure from Sweden’s ambitious climate policies and a broader turn away from scientific consensus. Climate scientist Johan Rockström told me last year that over the past few decades, every Swedish government, left or right, had invited him to share his research on planetary boundaries—except the current one, which has never reached out.
The government increasingly ignores advisory bodies that are meant to weigh in on legislation and proposals. This is most obvious in authoritarian crime policies. New bills have repeatedly 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 Sweden’s tradition of pragmatism.
The opposition’s small but steady lead in the polls may suggest the tide is turning, and that humanitarian ideals still underpin the views of Swedish voters. Recently, billionaire Roger Akelius, who used to vote conservative, said he would not vote for the right-wing 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 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 toward anti-establishment ideas and anger at the status quo. The tight polls suggest that millions of Swedes still see prisons and isolation as the future.
Eight years ago, conservative prime minister Ulf Kristersson promised a Holocaust survivor that 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.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the themes of Martin Gelins book How Sweden Lost Its Soul and Stopped Being Sweden
Beginner Questions
Q What is Martin Gelins book about
A Its a book about how Sweden has changed from a unique egalitarian society into a more unequal fractured country Gelin argues that the Swedish soulbased on trust community and the welfare statehas been damaged by recent political and economic shifts
Q Who is Martin Gelin
A He is a Swedish journalist and author who has written extensively about politics and society He often writes from a leftleaning perspective critical of the rise of the farright and the erosion of the welfare state
Q What does stopped being Sweden mean
A It refers to the idea that Sweden used to be an exceptiona country known for high taxes low inequality and a strong social safety net Gelin argues that it has become more like other countries with growing gaps between rich and poor and rising social tensions
Q What caused Sweden to lose its soul according to Gelin
A He points to several factors the privatization of public services tax cuts for the wealthy the rise of the Sweden Democrats and the failure to integrate immigrants These have broken the trust and solidarity that held Swedish society together
Q Is this a political book
A Yes it is clearly political Gelin is critical of centerright and rightwing policies and argues that Sweden needs to return to its social democratic roots to heal
Advanced Questions
Q What is the Swedish model and how does Gelin say it was destroyed
A The Swedish model refers to a system of strong unions high taxes and a generous welfare state that reduced inequality Gelin argues it was dismantled starting in the 1990s by both centerright and centerleft governments through deregulation privatization and tax reforms
Q How does Gelin connect immigration to the loss of Swedish soul
A He argues that Sweden failed to integrate many immigrants leading to segregation and parallel societies This in turn fueled the rise of the farright and
