How the Swedish left embraced a pandemic response rooted in neoliberalism.
As Sweden heads for the polls on 11 September, the Swedish Left Party (a socialist party that is currently the fifth largest party in the Swedish parliament) is campaigning on traditional issues of economic redistribution and increased welfare provision.
But one issue is completely absent from its campaign: its actions during the Covid-19 pandemic. These actions have been remarkable to say the least.
To put it bluntly, the stance that the Left Party and most of the rest of the Swedish left have taken on the Covid-19 pandemic has had far more in common with that of foreign hard rightists such as former U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro than with that of progressives abroad.
Much like the American and Brazilian hard right, Swedish leftists have fanned scepticism on face masks, criticised legislation allowing for short-term restrictions and publicly questioned the effectiveness of robust public health measures.
They have neglected to push for mitigation measures in schools, have remained silent when care workers have been instructed not to use personal protective equipment, and have done nothing when Swedish businesses have banned employees from wearing protective face masks at work.
Deference to public authority
Unlike the foreign hard right, Swedish leftists have been driven in their positions on the pandemic not by ideology but by a determination to defer authority on pandemic policy to Sweden’s Public Health Authority (PHA), the architect of Sweden’s pandemic response.
The PHA is an unelected state agency that secured vast power over Swedish pandemic policy early during the pandemic in a context of a weak government and an atmosphere of national crisis.
Since then, it has developed and communicated most decisions on the pandemic, assuming a role that has gone far beyond what is customary for a Swedish state agency. As one Swedish political scientist pointed out, the extent of the PHA’s power during the pandemic has no precedent in recent history of Swedish crisis management.
The PHA’s policy actions - including on masks, the importance of state-led contagion control measures and the desirability of commercial and public closures - have repeatedly aligned with the priorities of the foreign hard right.
Perhaps most problematically, the PHA’s power has not been matched by any corresponding democratic control. As a state agency, the PHA has successfully asserted its autonomy of decision-making and has exercised its power over the Swedish pandemic response with little oversight or balancing. For all intents and purposes, it has acted as a technocratic power holder: it has been unelected, politically unaccountable yet vested with far-reaching power.
Adoring comrades
Despite the obvious democratic deficit of the PHA’s role, the Swedish Left Party has remained a staunch supporter of the agency.
Senior Left Party officials have even engaged in open adulation of PHA functionaries, particularly state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who has been the face of Sweden’s pandemic response.
For example, the Left Party’s public health policy spokesperson Karin Rågsjö has referred to Tegnell as a “bureaucrat with the halo of a hero”, while her colleague, the MP Hanna Gunnarsson has tweeted fawningly about Tegnell on repeated occasions, including twice “All power to Tegnell, our liberator” (a reference to an Astrid Lindgren’s children’s book).
Media pundits on the left have been equally barefaced in their idolatry of the PHA. One of the clearest example of this was a sexually charged adorational piece about Tegnell in Sweden’s largest left-wing newspaper Aftonbladet, which mused on Tegnell’s “wonderful torso…his straight bust”, and the author’s love of “academic men with coloured sweaters on top of long-sleeved shirts”.
Deepening the democratic deficit
Such grovelling is problematic for obvious reasons.
First, it disenfranchises citizens who are impacted by the agency’s decisions. Where should the aggrieved turn if their democratic representatives refuse to criticise the PHA on principle? Not for nothing anger with the Left Party’s stance has been seething among some leftist grassroots during the pandemic.
Second, it has reduced political pressure on the PHA to rectify decisions that have gone against international scientific consensus. Among the PHA’s numerous off-beat actions, it has played down the importance of aerosol and a-/presymptomatic Covid transmission, played down the need for PPE in health care during the first pandemic wave, refused to recommend that all members of a household with a documented Covid infection quarantine (before December 2020), declined to recommend that face masks be used widely in health care (before December 2020) and on public transport (before January 2021), and denied children between 5-11 years Covid vaccinations.
All of these decisions have been scientifically controversial. None of them have been well substantiated with evidence (the PHA rarely publishes its evidence or cites the sources for its decisions). Yet the Left Party and other Swedish leftists have stood by them uncritically.
A sharp turn right
Most awkwardly for the Swedish left, the PHA’s pandemic response is expressly rooted in neo-liberal ideas, which are not usually the object of socialist reverence.
The Swedish researchers Carl Rådestad and Oscar Larsson noted in an article from before the pandemic that Sweden’s crisis management system came to be increasingly shaped by neo-liberal thinking after the early 1990s. One principle that came to occupy a key place in the new approach to managing crises was responsibilisation, a term that denotes the successive shifting of responsibility for elements of a crisis response to individual citizens.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, individual responsibility has been a central principle of the Swedish response. State officials have mantrically stressed the need for people to take “own responsibility”. Vulnerable citizens have been asked to protect themselves, including by sheltering in their homes or by keeping distance to others. The public as a whole has been urged to help limit the contagion by voluntarily adhering to a set of public health guidelines issued by the PHA.
But while Swedish authorities have appealed to individual responsibility, they have neglected to implement key public health measures themselves. Among other things, they have failed to introduce the ECDC’s recommended safety measures in schools, effectively test incoming travellers to Sweden, implement an effective testing-tracing-isolation system and launch a Covid-19 monitoring app. Sweden’s then prime minister Stefan Löfvén, even publicly cast doubt on the effectiveness of state-led public health measures.
Individual, not public, responsibility
As the French philosopher Emilie Hache has noted, the principle of individual responsibility is central to neo-liberalism and has historically underpinned efforts to individualise responsibility of issues that were previously considered to lie within the state’s domain, from health to traffic safety.
Something similar has happened in Sweden during the pandemic. The Swedish state has shifted basic responsibilities for public health protection from the state to individuals with rhetoric of individual responsibility. Individuals have been told to take responsibility for their own and others’ health, even though the corollary has been that the vulnerable have been made dependent for their health and lives on the voluntary good behaviour of others.
With the state abdicating from its public health responsibilities, the groups who have suffered the most during the pandemic have been those who have not been able to protect themselves and have been the most vulnerable to the virus. The elderly, the poor, immigrants, service workers, people with disabilities and people with underlying medical conditions have all been severely affected in Sweden, far more so than in Sweden’s Nordic neighbours.
Statistics from the National Board of Social Affairs and Health, for example, show that 1 in 169 Swedes with personal assistance had died of Covid-19 by June 2022. This can be compared to 1 in 621 people in the Swedish population as a whole. Overall, close to 20 000 people in Sweden have died in Covid-19, which is more than in Denmark, Norway and Finland combined.
Explaining the turn
How may the Swedish left’s embrace of a pandemic response that is rooted in neo-liberal thought, has played down the importance of state action and has blindsided vulnerable groups be explained?
First, there are the personal ties between the Left Party and the PHA. In a remarkable conflict of interest, Karin Rågsjö was employed by the PHA while serving as the Left Party’s spokesperson on the pandemic response (she was on a leave of absence from the PHA for her political work and ended her employment there in April 2021). In disclosed e-mails between Rågsjö and her colleagues at the PHA, Rågsjö repeatedly showered praise on the PHA for its handling of the pandemic (and on occasion slandered critics of the agency). Rågsjö’s close relationship with the PHA presumably did not incline her to perform a watchdog role on the PHA.
Second, there is the rise in Sweden during the pandemic of a specific brand of left-wing nationalism. Political scientist Gina Gustavsson has noted that support for Sweden’s pandemic response has had a nationalist edge and frequently been couched in rhetoric of national exceptionalism. The cult of Anders Tegnell, with its bizarre manifestations, is part and parcel of this progressive nationalist outpouring that has helped to solidify support for the PHA among leftists.
Third, there is the gentrification of the Swedish leftist elite. Most of the leftists who have been prominent in the pandemic debate have been national politicians or media pundits, many of them members of the middle and upper middle classes, with high salaries, residences in wealthy parts of Stockholm and presumably better-positioned to protect themselves from infection. They have rarely, if ever, expressed awareness of their privileges in face of a pandemic that has struck the disadvantaged members of society the hardest. Nor have they spoken of how their social position may have influenced their stance on the pandemic.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the pandemic was early on constructed as a crisis of disinformation and distrust in government in Sweden. Many Swedes on the left, with fresh memories of the disinformation that took place during the election of Donald Trump as US President and the Brexit debate in the U.K. in 2016, positioned themselves in the Swedish pandemic debate with this in mind. Many viewed deference to the PHA – which was perceived as a non-political state expert body – as a means of guarding against disinformation and political populism, while challenges to it were often seen as socially irresponsible and even harmful. Abstaining from criticising the PHA was elevated into a hallmark of the responsible Swedish citizen - while the PHA pursued a deeply political pandemic response free from democratic accountability.
Right friends?
While many international progressives have looked aghast at Sweden’s pandemic response, numerous members of the foreign hard right, including Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, the libertarian Cato Institute and Donald Trump’s pandemic advisor Scott Atlas, have praised it as a model to follow. This has been a sore point for many Swedish leftists.
But even as Swedish leftists have been irritated by the support of the foreign hard right, some of them have themselves added insult to injury by endorsing publications from right-wing sources seen to support the Swedish response. Swedish leftists have referenced articles from foreign conservative tabloids such as the Toronto Sun and the Daily Mail. They have shared articles by affiliates of the libertarian Brownstone Institute. They have endorsed a non-peer-reviewed and comprehensively debunked research paper by libertarian economists who claimed legal restrictions were ineffective in halting the spread.
Some have themselves – perhaps unwittingly – peddled right-wing rhetoric to justify the response. Political chief editor of Aftonbladet, Anders Lindberg, who has close ties with the ruling Social Democratic Party, has unabashedly endorsed the PHA’s pandemic response. In doing so, he has not shied from using nationalist dog whistling, Trumpist slurs, and blatant appeals to authority.
Others have stayed silent when PHA representatives have gone beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. When Tegnell and former state epidemiologist (and PHA consultant) Johan Giesecke blamed immigrants for Sweden’s high rate of contagion, the response of the left was muted. Such expressions of xenophobia would have caused a furor in the left’s anti-racist ranks in other contexts.
Left adrift
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, Sweden’s left reacted not by fighting for the inclusion of the interests of vulnerable groups in the national pandemic strategy but by insisting that the Public Health Authority should wield full authority in designing that strategy. With few exceptions, Swedish leftists prioritised shoring up the authority of a state agency over demonstrating solidarity with vulnerable groups. It was a stance made all the more remarkable by the fact that the PHA’s vision of contagion control was expressly rooted in right-wing principles and ideas.
The ideological confusion of the Swedish left during the pandemic can be seen as a part of a wider story of Western left-wing disorientation in recent years. Across the West, left-wing parties have been at pains to reconcile their search for policy-making power with fidelity to ideological principle in an age of growing neo-liberal governance.
Yet, the Swedish left’s failure during the Covid-19 pandemic has arguably reached further. A gentrified Swedish left-wing leadership imbricated with the apparatus of the state has acted on policy priorities that have had little to do with social solidarity and far more with safeguarding the stability of the state system in a context of crisis. The price for doing so, the left has found, has been endorsing a pandemic response rooted in values and principles anathema to its own.