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As European countries enter a more conservative phase, many social democratic parties find themselves in a difficult situation. They understand that many voters want more conservative policies. But at the same time, they must distance themselves from the right-wing parties that are now proposing precisely such policies. Socialist parties therefore need to adapt to a certain extent to a new view of migration and crime prevention, but they must also show voters that they are something other than just conservative.
In Sweden, this is becoming clear when the large social democratic party turns to the liberal conservative Moderates and proposes a ten-year cooperation on organized crime.
The background is that Sweden has had almost uncontrolled immigration for a long time. People were attracted to Sweden because it was easy to get a residence permit, either for refugee reasons or for work. It was also easy to quickly enjoy the welfare system that was built for Swedish citizens but which people from other countries also had access to as soon as they were granted the right to stay in the country.
Most people today acknowledge that excessive immigration contributed greatly to Sweden’s unprecedented levels of organized crime. And since 2022, Sweden has had a right-wing center-right government that is now taking control of immigration and is seriously tightening penalties and giving the police new tools. Several measures are now being taken to help Swedish society overcome the organized and often deadly crime that has plagued the country for a couple of decades and has increased in brutality in the last five years.
The Social Democrats’ problem is that they also want to show voters that they take crime seriously. They don’t want to appear “soft on crime” while the right-wing parties are the ones saving the country from ruthless criminals.
But the problem is that the small parties on the left that the Social Democrats want to form a government with after the election next fall are not at all as interested in cracking down on crime. These are parties that are still living in a progressive dream about the inherent goodness of all people. But that is a view that is no longer embraced by most Swedes. And you don’t win elections in Sweden by being progressive anymore.
So what do the Social Democrats do then? Well, they propose that they themselves and the liberal-conservative Moderates form a ten-year pact against gang crime. This is needed, they say, to create continuity in the work against crime. We must be persistent, they say. We must have a strategy that is firm regardless of whether it is the right or the left that is in power.
What does this mean if not that the Social Democrats know that they will never be able to complete the new policies that are now being put in place with the help of the right-wing parties if they themselves come to power? They are stuck with their progressive friends in the former communist “Left Party” and the Green Party.
But the purpose of the Social Democrats’ invitation to the Moderates is also to neutralize the large new social conservative party on the right: the Sweden Democrats. For the Social Democrats, the Sweden Democrats are a much more dangerous opponent than the liberal conservative Moderates because this new conservative party is taking working-class voters who previously voted for the Social Democrats.
And it is precisely the Sweden Democrats that have pushed Swedish politics to the right by growing rapidly and challenging the left-wing thinking that was previously so dominant in Sweden. It was the Sweden Democrats who first argued that Sweden needed to regulate its immigration. It was the Sweden Democrats who determined that Sweden needed a new criminal policy. And it is now the Sweden Democrats who are showing the way for the right-wing alliance that has now governed Sweden since 2022.
The Social Democrats understand that the Sweden Democrats were right. But they cannot admit that. Nor do they want to give the Sweden Democrats the political legitimacy that would mean inviting them to collaborate.
So, what they are doing is proposing that the Moderates and the Social Democrats establish a ten-year pact for a new criminal policy to be able to pursue the conservative policy that the voters want and at the same time neutralize the party – the Sweden Democrats – that has so far stood for that policy.
Will the Moderates agree to such a pact? Hardly. They know that their voters would not forgive them. Not everyone in the Moderates likes the collaboration with the Sweden Democrats, but many more would disapprove of formal collaboration with the Social Democrats.