Why Sweden’s Social Democrats U turned against NATO
On November 8, Ulf Kristersson, Sweden’s newly elected Prime Minister, went to Turkey. He courted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as part of Sweden’s bid to join NATO. For many Swedes, the image that has come to symbolize the historic visit is a zoomed-in frame of Kristersson’s hand, small and twisted, squeezed to a bright red hue in Erdoğan’s grip.
After Sweden officially asked to join the military alliance in May, many NATO nations quickly signaled their enthusiasm at the prospect of Swedish membership. But Turkey was less keen to say the least. Sweden-Turkey relations have been sour for decades as a result of Sweden’s long-term support for the Kurds and the Kurdish struggle for independence. Every NATO member country has the right to veto new members, and Erdoğan made clear his intention to use that right against Sweden, a nation he sees as supporting terrorist movements in Turkey.
It was only several weeks later that Erdoğan signaled that he would be willing to lift Turkey’s veto in exchange for significant concessions. In a tripartite agreement signed in late June by Turkey, Sweden and Finland (the two Nordic nations asked to join NATO at the same time), Sweden and Finland agreed to end all support for the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the mainly Kurdish militia in Syria, because as well as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the militia fighting for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq.
They also agreed to speed up Turkey’s many extradition requests, mainly of Kurds accused of terrorism or association with the PKK. Finally, Sweden and Finland agreed to resume arms exports to Turkey “in line with alliance solidarity.” This will end a period of an effective arms embargo against Turkey imposed by Sweden and Finland in 2019, when both countries began refusing to issue new arms export licenses to Turkey as a result of its military offensive against Kurdish positions in Syria.
The message to Kurds, both in Sweden and elsewhere, is clear. The era of Swedish solidarity with the Kurds is over. For the many Swedish Kurds who are members of the Social Democrats or involved in the wider Swedish left, the feeling of betrayal is particularly acute. Just two years earlier, Sweden’s Social Democratic Foreign Minister Ann Linde, tweeted her support for the Kurds and urged Turkey to withdraw its troops from northern Syria. And just a year ago, the Social Democratic government was able to cling to power only as a result of an agreement with the independent parliamentarian Amineh Kakabaveha former Kurdish peshmerga fighter.
In a series of events that could hardly have been fabricated, Kakabaveh, having been expelled from the Left Party, found himself in the powerful position of making or breaking parliamentary majorities. The Social Democrats needed Kakabaveh’s vote and in return she wanted promises of continued support for Kurdish independence. A act between Kakabaveh and the Social Democrats was signed in November 2021. (Erdoğan would later accuse Sweden of harboring Kurdish terrorists “even in parliament.”) In 2022, everything changed. In August, Linde compared waved a PKK flag to wave an IS flag, while assuring Turkey that the deal with Kakabaveh had already expired in June, at the end of the Swedish Parliament.
Sweden pays a high moral price for its NATO membership. In return, binding security guarantees are expected from the alliance, such as Sweden was previously unable to receive (or give) as a non-aligned state. The standard argument is that Sweden needs these in light of the deteriorating security situation in Europe. When it became clear at the beginning of spring that Finland, one of Sweden’s most important military and strategic partners, wanted to join NATO, it seemed to many that Sweden had no other option but to join as well. (Finland shares a 1,340 km border with Russia and the memory of the 1939 Soviet invasion remains an important part of the nation’s culture).
Sweden has gradually expanded its cooperation with NATO since the 1990s and participated in joint exercises and missions (including Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya). Sweden already implicitly relies on NATO for its security in the event of an attack – and quite explicitly relies on other EU member states, most of which are already members of NATO. Sweden has already committed to support most other NATO nations should they be attacked (with some notable exceptions, including the US, Canada and Turkey) as a result of the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon, as well as their own unilateral commitments. Saying no to joining NATO under these circumstances, the argument goes, would make no sense. Sweden already incurs many of the costs and risks associated with NATO membership (it is already clear to Russia whose side Sweden is on), while receiving no official security guarantees in return.
But the argument should not be exaggerated. As a result of devastating economic sanctions and heavy military defeats, Russia’s ability to wage conventional war has been severely impaired. And while the invasion of Ukraine came as a shock to many, Russia’s willingness to invade countries in its vicinity had been clear ever since it invaded Georgia in 2008 and Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014. The full-scale attack on Ukraine began in February of this year. came as a surprise to many only because it showed that Vladimir Putin was willing to take greater risks than previously thought.
A stronger argument – one that has significant influence even among Swedish anti-NATO leftists who do not believe that the threat to Sweden has increased as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – is that joining the alliance is an act of solidarity with Finland and other Baltic countries . states. Many have actually claimed that Sweden is facing a moral cost for not join, just because. But the cost of solidarity with Finland and the Baltic states comes at the expense of Sweden’s solidarity with the Kurds.
On the Swedish left, the debate about NATO accession went so fast that the dust had barely kicked up before it settled down again. The key actor in the process was the Social Democratic Party, the largest party on the Swedish left. Throughout the party’s history, it has been a strong defender of Sweden’s long-standing policy of military non-alignment. (Swedish neutrality, unlike non-alignment, was abandoned long ago, formally when Sweden joined the EU in 1995).
At the beginning of March this year, the Social Democratic Party – in government at the time – still repeated a firm no to NATO. But then things changed quickly. On March 16, the Social Democrats appointed a working group on security issues that was tasked with analyzing Sweden’s security situation and political alternatives as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On 22 April, the Social Democrats started an “internal dialogue” within the party on security issues. On May 13, the Security Working Group published its bargain, which suggested that NATO would be a good alternative for Sweden. On May 15, the Social Democrats have Certainly they would say yes to NATO. Three days later, Sweden officially launched its bid to merge with Finland.
Abandoning a long-standing policy of military non-alignment over the course of a couple of weeks, without giving party members a real opportunity to debate the issue, let alone vote on it, seemed premature to many in the party. But that is exactly what one would have expected from the Social Democrats. One of the most successful political parties in post-war Europe, the Swedish Social Democrats operate on a highly centralized, top-down model. When a change in public opinion was felt (the March polls showed that a majority of Swedes for the first time were in favor of joining NATO), and before an upcoming election, the Social Democrats acted quickly.
The party leadership feared losing voters to the right if they did not join NATO. They knew that the election risk of joining was small, compared to the risks of not joining. Any harsh critics would simply vote for the Left or the Green Party instead – smaller parties whose votes the Social Democrats rely on to build coalitions. One of the risks of being such a successful party, it seems, is a tendency to focus blindly on short-term electoral strategy. However, the social democratic gamble was not enough to win the election. Although a pro-NATO stance was one of the reasons why support for the Social Democrats increased slightly before the election, the left-wing bloc unable to form a government coalition. Sweden is now governed by a right-wing coalition of four parties, the largest of which is the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats.
The Left Party and the Greens are still anti-NATO, but their criticism of the military alliance has been neither particularly loud nor engaging. Both parties are hindered to some extent by the fact that the Social Democrats are, and always have been, their only vehicle to power. Several top members of the Greens came out publicly in support of NATO, and the Left Party was not very vocal in its criticism before the election, appearing to drop or simply forget its earlier demand for a referendum on NATO. The left also put itself in a difficult position by vote against sent military aid to Ukraine in late February. This decision was met with huge public outcry, including from sections of the anti-NATO left. In response, the party leadership changed its policy within hours of the vote.
By then the damage was already done. People got the impression that the left’s solidarity with Ukraine consisted of nothing but empty words. A supportive position for Ukraine, which remained in strong opposition to NATO, became increasingly difficult to articulate in the months that followed. Moreover, many left-wing activists and politicians were too busy fighting neo-Nazis at home to worry about Sweden playing a role in American imperialism or Turkish nationalism abroad.
The Swedish attempt to join NATO opened a deep fissure in the Swedish left. And yet, somehow, the crack seems to have already been pushed beneath the surface. Both the left and the Greens undoubtedly felt a sense of defeat early on. The fight against NATO was over as soon as the Social Democrats turned. With the tripartite agreement with Turkey in place and a new right-wing government installed (with even fewer qualms about extraditing Kurds to Turkey than the Social Democrats), there are now few obstacles on Sweden’s path to NATO membership.
For the Swedish left — be it pro- or anti-NATO — this means that the focus must now change. What the Swedish left has always found most offensive about NATO is that it is not what it purports to be: a collective defense alliance. Too many NATO operations have fallen so far outside this mission statement that the slogan comes across as nothing more than a failed attempt to gaslight the rest of the world. NATO’s operations in Afghanistan and Libya are just the two most egregious examples.
Both Sweden and Finland are generally strongly opposed to using NATO military force in operations outside the area for reasons not clearly tied to collective self-defense (although both countries, it should be noted, participated in Afghanistan and Sweden in Libya). Given that Sweden and Finland, with a high degree of certainty, will both soon become members of NATO, the left in both countries should make it a priority to work for NATO to become what it already claims to be.