‘People don't want to hear about it': how the pandemic shaped Sweden's politics
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Loading... - Jackson Campbell
- 06 Sep 2022
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In the Stockholm neighbourhood of Tensta, the pandemic has left many feeling hopeless and disenfranchised, says Fatuma Mohamed.
While much of Sweden – including politicians – appear to have forgotten all about Covid, the health communicator and longtime resident said that many in the area are still grappling with its impact.
Although people had been advised by authorities to work from home, many in Tensta, with its high refugee population, had no choice but to go out because of the nature of their jobs.
“They didn’t have any possibility to stay at home,” said Mohamed, sitting outside Tensta Konsthall, a contemporary arts centre, where people were arriving for a coffee meet-up.
Two and a half years after the introduction of the “Swedish strategy”– the Scandinavian country’s divergent pandemic response, which kept schools open and eschewed lockdowns – the results are mixed.
Mental health and children’s learning appear to have been less affected than they might have been, although 2.57m infections were recorded in the population of just over 10 million and in excess of 19,900 died, with stark inequality exposed in the process.
In comparison, Norway, with a little over half Sweden’s population, has had 1.46m cases and nearly 4,000 deaths; while Finland, also with just over half Sweden’s population, has had 1.27m cases and nearly 5,700 deaths.
An independent commission into the handling of the pandemic, the findings of which were published earlier this year, found that while the choice of path for disease prevention and control was “fundamentally correct”, the measures “were too few and should have come sooner”. The government, it said, should have taken control of all aspects of crisis management from the start and had relied too heavily on its public health agency, Folkhälsomyndigheten.
And yet, as Sweden prepares to go to the polls on 11 September, in the first election since these life or death decisions were made, it is almost as if Covid never happened. Left- and right-leaning party leaders, who are in a tight race, are focusing on crime, immigration and energy prices but not Covid.
For many, this has highlighted the gulf between the living conditions of Sweden’s different communities. In Tensta, some groups of up to 10 people live in two-room flats, said Mohamed, 43, who has three daughters,
“But the ‘Swedish’,” she said, miming inverted commas with her hands, “they live, maybe two or three people in eight, seven or four rooms, maybe. So they had the opportunity to have social distance.
“It is not just a health problem,” she added. “This is a political problem.” Services such as banks, dentists and job centres had vanished from the area, she claimed, and many people were unemployed, splitting society into “parallel communities”. Read More…
