OPEN YOUR HEARTS

The Scandinavian model is built on the presumption that as many people as possible have jobs and thereby contribute to the common good. Buzzwords are freedom, equality, and taxation. The Swedish way is no exception to the rule.

That means there is one specific question that ought to engage everyone, regardless of political inclination, and it ought to be mandatory homework for anyone striving for political and economic power: what happens to the common welfare if a larger group of people does not work?

Now and then someone touches upon the subject in public conversation, but then backs off. For example, it’s a well known fact that Sweden has an ageing population. How can the younger generations possibly work long and hard enough to pay the amount of tax required to support all future retirees? Should the retirement age not be increased, shouldn’t the ageing have to provide for themselves for a few more years? It is a very real and serious problem across many developed nations, but nobody in Sweden seems particularly engaged; neither journalists, politicians, nor commentators on social media. It never gets heated, nobody is the target of hate speech on the subject, nobody is threatened or stalked for discussing demographics.

Nevertheless, the Swedish Model has a weak point, an in-built conundrum. If not enough people work, how will the state be able to acquire enough funds to maintain the good society citizens have become used to? The dilemma could very well have been debated in the early 1990s, when the number of employed in Sweden decreased by over half a million people. It would have been perfectly in keeping to question if the welfare state was at risk. But no one did, no one would or could declare or define this possible threat. Instead, they debated social benefits and focused mainly on fraud and the failures of the system. Hunting down benefit cheats or formulating a fundamental critique of a system that was ‘too generous’ dominated the debate completely. Hundreds of thousands were out of work, the welfare state’s dilemma was already activated, but not a word was spoken in public about it. News reports, opinion polls, and election campaigns — they all left a void in the public debate.

The welfare state can of course be threatened in many different ways, but if no one even acknowledges the existence of a threat, it remains diffuse, muddled, and ready to be used by anyone who chooses, and in any way. And there we are — the dilemma has been hijacked. Today, the threat to common welfare is associated with immigration and refugees, seemingly definitively and inarguably.

Maybe the then Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt wanted to change all that, in August 2014? Perhaps his speech was a way to regain lost territory in the public debate, to take control of how the dilemma was put into words? Maybe he also strived for transparency of the state of affairs. Whatever the reason, it was time to start campaigning for the coming election and Fredrik Reinfeldt gathered press and audience in a central square in Stockholm to give a speech. It turned out the to be the end of one chapter and the beginning of the present:

There are now refugees in numbers similar to the years of the Balkan crisis in the early 1990s. Therefore, I now appeal to the Swedish people for patience. I ask you to open your hearts in order to recognise people in a strong state of stress as their lives are under threat. They are fleeing to Europe. Towards freedom, towards improved living conditions. Be open. Be tolerant, even when people say that ‘there will be too many’, ‘it will be difficult’, ‘it will be hard’. Be tolerant and prove you remember that we’ve done it before. We have seen people flee from stress, escape oppression, people who have since entered our society, learned the Swedish language, got a job, and are now contributing to a better and freer Sweden.

There is something honourable in these words. They display confidence in the voters and a faith in them to make decisions that might cause them discomfort in the short term for the long-term good. Fredrik Reinfeldt put words to the dilemma, but it was too late. Instead of opening Swedish hearts, he became the first established politician to define the welfare state’s dilemma in the same way as the immigration-critical did, placing the common welfare in one hand and refugees in the other.

There were consequences. According to a ‘Diversity Barometer’, a survey conducted by Gävle University, a clear majority of the population were favourable to the idea that people should have the same social rights, regardless of whether they were born in Sweden or abroad. In the 2016 survey, however, the percentage recorded as favourable declined from 77 per cent to 55 per cent, the lowest figure since measurements began in 2005.

Reinfeldt’s speech turned out to be a crucial turning point. Up until then, welfare had been weighed against tax cuts. But from 1 o’clock on Saturday 16 August 2014, welfare was officially to be weighed on society’s scales against immigration. In one instant, the political debate changed and now was all about the costs of receiving refugees. The speech became an important explanation for the great success of the right-wing populist Swedish Democrats in the 2014 elections.

Examining social media from this period gives evidence for the thesis. Up until 16 August, the Swedish terms for ‘immigration’ and/or ‘refugee reception’ were mentioned on average in 745 tweets each week. After the speech, 2,438 tweets per week used the terms.

Checking the newspapers provides a similar result. The number of articles that linked the concepts ‘welfare’ and ‘immigration’ increased from 108 in the month of July, to 926 in the month of August — after the speech.

The open-your-hearts speech caused Fredrik Reinfeldt not only the loss of the general elections, governmental power and his job as leader of the conservative party (Moderaterna). It also changed the tone and vocabulary of the public debate in Sweden. If responsible politicians and opinion makers without an anti-immigrant agenda had been prepared to discuss the dilemma and had exposed the structural weakness of the welfare state earlier, Reinfeldt’s speech could have had a different meaning, the present could have had another colour and — who knows? — so could the future.