They call it "The Nordic gold" – the high level of social trust that exists in Sweden and other Nordic countries. It's why people buy flats with no survey and no lawyer, using the seller's estate agent and bidding by text message. It's what allowed Sweden to avoid a lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. It's what makes shared laundry rooms possible.
And for a long time, it led to a peculiarly technocratic, low-octane politics, where the Left Party firebrand Gudrun Schyman could be such close friends with the Moderate Party Prime Minister Carl Bildt that she was invited to his private 50th birthday party in Italy.
Some of the politics stories we've had this week have made me wonder (and I'm really, really not the first) whether this social trust – tillit in Swedish – is in peril.
Let's start with the scandal over the senior Sweden Democrat Richard Jomshof calling – first the left-wing journalist Anders Lindberg and then Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson a "quisling", backing up the former with a picture of Vidkun Quisling, the far-right politician who headed Norway's puppet government during Nazi occupation. (Find our word of the day on quisling here).
What struck me was not the name-calling, but that Jomshof seriously seems to believe that Sweden's entire left-wing establishment has conspired to flood the country with radical Islamists with the aim of overthrowing democracy. He also appears to believe that the Quran, the holy book of Islam, requires all Muslims – as an article of faith – to take up arms to establish a global caliphate.
I had a similar feeling when interviewing the Sweden Democrats' immigration spokesperson Ludvig Aspling, in the first of our series of pre-election interviews with the political parties' migration spokespeople. I suspect he'd have a few issues with Jomshof's positions, but he nonetheless displayed a striking lack of trust.
He argued, among other things, that:
- immigrants in Sweden deliberately fail to learn Swedish to make themselves unemployable so that they can collect benefits indefinitely without having to apply for jobs;
- Greece, Italy and Spain are doling out EU Long Term Residence permits to migrants who don't qualify just because they don't want these people in their countries;
- rejected asylum seekers from countries like Iran and Afghanistan are only pretending to fear returning, and indeed frequently go back for holidays and family visits.
Is this lack of trust only a feature of the far-right? I'd argue not.
Some on the left and centre believe that far-right parties like the Sweden Democrats, and the social media influencers supporting them, are funded by Russia or by shadowy US dark money. Green campaigners and party supporters suspect politicians like Environment Minister Romina Pourmokhtari and Energy Minister Ebba Busch are in the pay (or in some way under the influence) of the international oil industry and their think tanks and lobby organisations.
None of these suspicions can, or should, be dismissed out hand – just as you can easily find Islamic theologians who absolutely do believe Muslims have a duty to take up arms to establish a global caliphate.
But if they start to take over more and more of the political debate in Sweden, and get in the way of the sensible, boring discussion that has helped make Sweden, if not great, then impressively well-functioning, the country will be much the worse for it.
You can hear James Savage, Mandy Pipher and me discuss all this – and learn the etiquette around slurping crayfish – in this week's Sweden in Focus podcast.
Politics
The election campaign kicked off in full force this week, with both Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson launching bus tours on Monday morning. Andersson launched her campaign with an anodyne pledge to be guided as leader by three principles: to make Sweden safer, richer, and more cohesive. Kristersson pledged to build 4,000 terraced houses in Stockholm.
On Friday, Moderate Party finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson outlined the 70 billion kronor in savings she had identified to fund her party's election pledges. The Left Party pledged to fight for funding to re-establish night trains to Norrland.
The Left Party came under fire, after a columnist for the Expressen newspaper broke the news that a Left Party MP had written a letter of support to a Palestinian terrorist, who it transpired had helped organise a bombing at a bar mitzvah in Israel. The Left Party apologised, blaming poor research, although the MP was allowed to stay in position.
The Moderates and the Sweden Democrats also sought to capitalise on the up to 80,000 immigrants who arrived in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta (even though almost all were soon returned to Morocco).
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Migration Minister Johan Forssell insisted in a text in Svenska Dagbladet that Sweden might re-introduce border controls to stem the tide, and warned a future left-wing government in Sweden might try a similar migrant amnesty to the Spanish one blamed for the crisis.
James Savage, in an opinion piece, argued that by abandoning Spain at a time when it was facing what looks like an "orchestrated attack", Sweden was undermining European solidarity just when it was most needed.
Migration news
We published the second of our series of interviews with families in Sweden who have been divided by the country's immigration rules, with Swedish sound engineer Gustav speaking about his "rage" when his Costa Rican wife Luisa Fernandez, a screenwriter, was denied permanent residency because her income was deemed too unpredictable. Mandy Pipher will publish her third interview next week.
The so-called 'snitch law' or angiverilagen, which gives employees at six government agencies a duty to report any paperless migrants they come across in their work, has already led to 80 people being reported to the border police, with most reports coming from the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen).
In an election pledge that generated a furious response from readers, Migration Minister Johan Forssell on Thursday promised that his government would bring in a fast track to citizenship for some applicants if re-elected.
Sweden's parliament is meeting for a special summer session on Wednesday and Thursday next week so the government can pass 13 laws it didn't have time to fit into the normal schedule, chief among them being a new law bringing in stricter rules for family reunion and a new law bringing in tougher punishments for crimes.
Annika Hirvonen and Niels Paarup-Pedersen, the immigration spokespeople for the Green Party and Centre Party, told The Local that the four opposition parties had agreed to unite behind two proposals to soften the bill, raising the prospect that the government might be defeated on the last voting day of the parliament.
What else have we been writing about?
After 15 years in Sweden, I still can't get the hang of week numbers. Here's an article on why Swedes use them and how to understand them.
One thing I have got the hang of is Sweden's culture of not tipping – or at least had until, for a number of reasons, the social mores started to shift. In our reader survey, a clear majority of respondents agreed that expectations either definitely had or possibly had changed, although most of them were as unhappy about this as I am.
Finally, I've spent the last few weeks bouncing back and forth between my suddenly very trendy and lively district in Malmö and the quiet of the Skåne countryside, so I understood James Savage's point when he argued in an op-ed that while the peacefulness of the Swedish countryside should be protected, the cities should be allowed to be noisy.
I'm now going back to my peaceful bit of countryside where I am considering establishing a rhubarb plantation before returning to the ear-shattering noise of the Malmö festival on Sunday.
Have a lovely weekend!