The sickness: Swedish right-wing politics in August 2026

A wonderful parody of the latest propaganda from Sverigedemokraterna. Made by ponyhans, an alias on Instagram.

This is how, in January 2020, the Covid virus exploded into the world’s general population outside China. An eighty-year-old passenger with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in his lungs showed symptoms during the cruise and became sick. That passenger was advised by the ship’s doctor to disembark in Hong Kong, a densely populated city of 7.5 million people, where he infected an untold number of others. “What happened on the Diamond Princess cruise ship is the definition of a superspreader event,” says retired admiral Brett Giroir, the U.S. assistant secretary for health at the time. These close-quarters environments—which also include airplanes, subway cars, crowded restaurants, gyms, and other places where people stand right next to one another—become superspreader events as the normal rate of infection transmission gets amplified by close proximity and poor air circulation.¹

When I went on the tram this morning, full of people, someone coughed. A lot. It made me wonder.

I was reading Tidöpakten² this morning. It's a book about the Tidö parties and how their pact, the so-called Tidö pact, came about. It's a pact between four right-wing parties in the Swedish parliament, notably with Sverigedemokraterna, an extreme-right-wing party that was formed by Nazis, a past that is very much present today.

"I will not cooperate, talk, collaborate, or govern together with SD."

Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson in Aftonbladet, 8 January 2018.

"We will not negotiate with SD."

Christian Democrat leader Ebba Busch on Sveriges Radio, 12 November 2018.

"We will not negotiate a budget with SD. That is out of the question. You can only negotiate a budget with parties you are close to, in terms of values."

Liberal Party leader Nyamko Sabuni in the magazine Nu, 3 July 2019.³

Times have changed, obviously.

Today, things are even more scurried and frenzied. The Tidö pact doesn't really remain⁴, simply because Sweden is taking over pointers from the USA and England; a pretty exact point-by-point analysis by Ben Riley-Smith is available in his excellent book The Right to Rule: Thirteen Years, Five Prime Ministers and the Implosion of the Tories, which I've written about.

In a sense, the Tidö parties are all rallying around xenophobia. They're supporting Sverigedemokraterna to be able to stay in power. Two of the parties, Kristdemokraterna (the Christian Democrats) and Liberalerna (the Liberals) are very close to being excluded from government because they're slight of reaching the minimum number of votes that are required to stay in government. The Christian Democrats—a misnomer of there ever was one; they're not christian and whether they're for or against democracy depends on the weather—and the Liberals both suddenly want to side with the lefties, something they said wouldn't happen.

As we've seen, they've said a number of things. Sure, Ebba Busch is sentenced for gross defamation, and the Liberals have foregone all of their ideals, but here we are, with a handful of days left until it's time for the Swedish general election.

I can't tell who'll win. Nobody can. What we can do is keep track of those who lied and hold them responsible. And, at the very least, if we vote for them, what does that say about ourselves?

Even if you feel out of breath, infected by all sides, stressed out, and like no political party truly seems to care for what you care about, know this: any party that foregoes its ideals, that sells out for votes, that treats 'the foreign' the same as 'disease', it's happened before and it didn't work then and it won't work now.