Politics in Sweden: Why record gang-related blasts haven't rocked the government

Local Sweden

04-02-2025

Sweden's problem with gang violence, together with high energy prices, won Sweden's government the 2022 election.
In January the country recorded its worst month ever for gang-related incidents involving the use of explosive devices such as grenades or car bombs.
Police have said that the targets in at least three of the more than 30 explosives incidents to have taken place, in Enskededalen, Kärrtorp and Årstaberg, have been relatives of people in the Nero network, a drug trafficking gang linked to the gang leader Rawa Majid.
The perpetrators are almost all youths under the age of 15 who have no connection to the target, with Tobias Bergkvist, deputy police chief in Stockholm claiming there is an "inexhaustible supply of perpetrators".
Given it's two years since the current government got into power, you can understand why Sweden's media and opposition parties have tentatively started trying to point the finger at the government.
The questions began on SVT's flagship Sunday politics programme, Agenda, when Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer came in for a grilling from the journalist Cecilia Gralde.
"You don't have control over the situation, the PM says, and many people feel that the police can't protect them, what do you have to say to them?" Gralde asked.
She followed up by asking why, when Sweden has brought in tougher punishments and stricter laws, the threat had not gone away. "Why haven't these measures had any real effect?"
That same question came again when Strömmer stood up for an interview with the Dagens Nyheter newspaper. "Why haven't the government's policies led to a significant reduction in violent crime?" the journalist Hans Olsson asked.
So far, though, Strömmer is not looking under too much pressure.
Whatever you think about the laws the government has brought in to combat gang crime, there have at least been many of them.
The measures have allowed Strömmer to boast of "new resources, new tools, and new ways of working" which, he claims he is "hopeful" will eventually have a positive effect.
He and his Sweden Democrat allies can also still blame the former government. On the Agenda show, Strömmer pointed out that the number of fatal shootings had tripled between 2012 and 2022, when the Social Democrats were still in power.
He's also helped by the fact that the opposition Social Democrats are being ultra-cautious, their one overriding strategy being to avoid disagreement with the government at all costs, which could make them look weak on crime.
Their justice spokesperson Teresa Carvalho admitted during Saturday's debate that her party bore some of the blame for Sweden's gang crime problem.
"It's absolutely clear that no government, either the former government or the Alliance government that came before it, did enough to turn this around," she said. "It's absolutely obvious that we didn't do enough, although we did a lot."
The Social Democrats are also well aware that while voters might be sceptical of the government's chances of getting violent crime under control - in a survey at the end of September, 61 percent said it was doing a bad job - they rate the Social Democrats even worse.
So instead of attacking the government on crime head-on, the party is instead seeking to position itself as a partner when it comes to stricter punishments and other repressive measures.
Its attacks focus more on the government's failure on preventative measures, on reducing inequality, and on cutting segregation and exclusion.
Carvalho has called on Strömmer to inform parliament about the current situation with the use of explosives and has also asked for the government to cooperate with the opposition on possible solutions.
Last week she called for the whole of southern Stockholm to be turned into a stop-and-search zone.
This provoked some something of a backlash, given that her predecessor as justice spokesperson, Ardalan Shekarabi, had argued, only last year, that stop-and-search zones were counterproductive.
The government has also rushed out new initiatives, with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announcing at a press conference that he was accelerating plans to allow police to hack into the phones and social media accounts of minors.
The government also proposed lowering Sweden's age of criminal responsibility from 15, where it has been since 1864, to 14. Carvalho declined to criticise the proposal.
So the government seems to have survived this year's spate of gang-related bombings unscathed. Will it be more vulnerable if the number of gang shootings, which has been declining, also starts to rise?
It might make it harder for the government parties to continue attacking the Social Democrats for their failure to get gang crime under control between 2014 and 2022, if they do no better in their four years in power.
But it's hard to see, even if there's a spate of gang crime in the run-up to the 2026 election, that the Social Democrats will be in a position to argue they could do better.
What else has been happening?
Leader of Centre Party youth wing resigns
Caroline von Seth, the chair of the Centre Party's youth wing, who in November called for the party's leader Muharrem Demirok to resign, has herself resigned after facing criticism for making her call without the backing of her organisation. "If you don't believe in the direction your party is taking, you shouldn't represent it either," she said in a post on Facebook.
Von Seth is part of a faction seeking to unseat Demirok and potentially later make the Centre Party open up to backing Ulf Kristersson as prime minister, so raising the chance of the government remaining in power after the 2026 election.
Senior Moderates call for part-privatisation of state companies
Two senior Moderate politicians have called for an end to green industrial subsidies and the part-privatisation of Vattenfall and LKAB, Sweden's two leading state-owned industrial companies.
Douglas Thor, chair of the Moderate Party's youth wing, and Daniel Källenfors, the Moderate mayor of the monied Stockholm suburb of Lidingö, made the proposals in a debate article in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, arguing that state involvement in industry had helped inflate a "green bubble" in Sweden.
They said that while companies like LKAB and Vattenfall should remain "largely state-owned", they should bring in "private partners who can curb the irresponsible approach of politicians with other people's money".
As for green industrial subsidies like the so-called Industriklivet, or "Industrial Leap", they said that they represented "the failed industrial policy of the 1970s...resurrected in green clothes".
Swedish government to move forward with plan to revoke citizenship for gang members
The Swedish government will move ahead with plans to make it possible to revoke citizenship for gang members, Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer confirmed on Friday, despite a cross-party committee stopping short of making such a proposal.
On January 15th, the cross-party Committee on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms proposed changing Sweden's constitution so that dual citizens who commit 'crimes which threaten Sweden's security' can lose their citizenship.
It stopped short of making it possible to revoke citizenship from gang criminals, although the three government parties and the far-right Sweden Democrats added a reservation to the conclusions explaining that they had wanted to go further and extend the possibility of revocation to other serious crimes such as gang violence.