Who Wants to Fix Sweden?

🇸🇪 Svenska · 🇬🇧 English · 🇪🇸 Español

Sweden’s strength has traditionally been a strong society and a high level of trust. We have paid high taxes, completed military service, donated blood and done our part. We have done so because we trusted that society would be there when we ourselves needed help.

We have counted on healthcare, the police, defence, social insurance and pensions. We have not built our lives around having to buy our way out of every crisis or summon our relatives to secure our rights.

But politicians have weakened one area after another. They have shut services down, privatised them, shifted responsibility and built layers of administration. The changes have been sold as modernisation and efficiency. To someone left without help, the sales pitch is irrelevant.

We have paid for protection that is supposed to work

My starting point is simple: the systems should exist for those who contribute and have contributed to them. Anyone who works, pays tax and does their part should be able to trust that the protection will work when illness, unemployment or old age arrives.

It is a reciprocal social contract. Politicians cannot treat it as an unlimited fund to distribute from and then ask those who financed it to accept worse terms.

I believe the contract has been hollowed out by extending commitments to large groups who have not contributed, while the protection has deteriorated for those who paid. When money and capacity are insufficient, someone has to wait, go without or pay a second time.

Immigration policy is part of this. Accepting many people without ensuring employment, self-sufficiency and functioning public services means making decisions whose consequences others must bear. Politicians made those commitments. Responsibility should therefore rest with them.

Freedom of choice with nothing to choose

When my daughter was born, I applied for a preschool place and called the municipality. I expected the municipality to arrange one. The answer was that I was free to choose—but they had no place for me.

I had to call preschools that were full and had long waiting lists.

You cannot choose something that does not exist.

They had replaced the responsibility to provide a place with my freedom to look for one. It is quite an elegant way to abandon a parent while calling it a reform.

Three ways to break what we share

I see three main causes: help has been extended beyond those who paid for it, planning has been replaced by privatisation, and public services have been smothered in administration.

Outsourcing a service does not make the need for planning disappear. Someone must still ensure that places, staff and preparedness exist. When responsibility is divided among purchasers, providers and regulators, everyone can refer the matter elsewhere while the person who needs help is left standing.

And when teachers, healthcare workers and police officers must document, report and follow up ever more, we have to ask what is being pushed aside. I want education, care and safety for my tax money. A well-documented lack of help is still a lack of help.

Defence, healthcare, schools, railways and the electricity supply: my criticism is that politicians have treated essential public functions as experimental workshops. Citizens have to live with the results.

When society fails, others take over

When tax-funded healthcare does not feel accessible, those who can afford it buy private insurance. When the police do not provide the protection people need, they seek protection elsewhere.

Someone accustomed to relying on family, a church or other networks may have an alternative. Someone who has relied on Swedish public authorities may have far less to fall back on.

Imagine two motorists after a collision: one calls the insurance company, the other summons relatives to pressure the other party into paying on the spot. The example shows what can happen when common rules are replaced by private power. A society cannot function if justice becomes a question of who can mobilise the most people.

Pensions, too, must embody the idea of reciprocity. A long working life should make a clear difference to what is in your wallet. If the difference between having contributed and not having contributed feels negligible, the willingness to support the system is undermined.

Stop insulting the voters you have failed

It is hardly surprising that people become furious when the protection they paid for does not work. Yet their discontent is too often met with labels: racist, communist or extremist, depending on which alternative they turn to.

First, people are failed. Then they are insulted for seeking another solution. After that, they are asked for their votes again.

I do not want to vote either for those who want to pour more money into dysfunctional services without repairing them, or for those who want to continue dismantling what we share through further privatisation. Nor am I persuaded by parties that become trapped in a single issue and refuse to see the whole.

I want to vote for someone who wants to fix Sweden.

But if those who contributed to the destruction will not even acknowledge what they have done—why should I trust them to repair it?

This English translation was prepared with AI from the author’s Swedish article. The featured illustration in the original is AI-generated.