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Is it conservative to want to change a country’s constitution? Shouldn’t conservatives always want to preserve the status quo and resist change? Perhaps not in cases where laws and constitutions have been characterized by modern progressive thinking.
In the highly democratic and for many years well-known progressive kingdom of Sweden, a political battle is currently underway over the constitution.
Seven out of eight parties in the national parliament agree to make it more difficult to change the constitution. What previously applied was that a normal so-called simple majority with more than 50 percent of the votes in the national parliament could vote through a constitutional amendment if the same decision was made twice with an election in between. Now it will be required that two-thirds of the members vote in favor of the change when the proposal comes up for a vote on the second occasion. More members of parliament will therefore be needed for the constitution to be changed.
This may sound reasonable, especially from a conservative perspective where people like to proceed cautiously with changes in society. But it’s more complicated than that.
For almost 100 years, the Social Democrats have been the dominant party in Swedish politics. It has been the largest party, and it has been the party that has in many ways led social development. At least until the 1990s. After that, the Social Democrats have mostly devoted themselves to adapting to neoliberal and conservative winds and trying to maintain their power.
As long as the Social Democrats were the party that drove social development forward, or at least believed that they did, the party was not interested in making it more difficult to change the constitution. Back then, they even defended the system where only a simple majority was required for changes to be passed. But now that they have largely left their mark on Swedish society, it will suddenly become more difficult to change how Swedes view Sweden and how Sweden should be governed.
Now, instead, it is the new right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats, that wants to stick with the old order. The Sweden Democrats recently realized that the new constitutional amendment would give the Social Democrats – who have been at 30-35 percent in the elections for twenty years and thus maintain their position as Sweden’s largest party – veto rights against new constitutional amendments.
Even if all other parties would like to see a change, the Social Democrats, if they continue to be about the same size, can gather the number of votes needed to stop desirable changes.
Now in the 2020s, it is the social-conservative and nationalist Sweden Democrats who are leading the development of Swedish society. It is their policies in migration, crime prevention and energy that the other parties are adapting to. And it is the Sweden Democrats who have the strength to raise the difficult and sensitive issue of all the Swedish citizenships that have been distributed on weak grounds to all the migrants who have come to Sweden in the last 30 years.
Many Swedes today believe that immigrants who have been granted Swedish citizenship but who engage in serious crime, who have contacts with violent Islamism, and perhaps even those who have been granted citizenship on incorrect grounds should have their citizenship withdrawn. At least in cases where the migrants have dual citizenship and have thus remained citizens of their countries of origin.
But this requires amendments to the constitution, since it is clearly stated there that no Swedish citizen may be deprived of their citizenship.
There are also several articles in the constitution that suggest that Sweden’s social order is based on the idea of the equal value of all people, which could have been used as an argument for previously almost uncontrolled immigration. Here, new articles about the specific responsibility that Swedish society has for its own citizens, and thus not for people in general, could constitute a welcome clarification.
But all of this may now become more difficult when all the old parties, led by the Social Democrats, are making it more difficult to change the constitution.
So how come a conservative party like the Sweden Democrats is now the party that wants to facilitate social change? Because it is the progressive parties that have shaped modern Sweden.