Limits of pandemic policy critique: unveiling the shades of Swedish democracy

This paper explores the pandemic debates of ‘us vs. them’ in Sweden, drawing on political theory and online ethnography. In 2020, the attention for pandemic policies in Sweden was personified in the chief epidemiologist of the state, who received high levels of respect and affective idealisation (including portraits of him tattooed in the fans’ body parts). Not everyone agreed. The national media picked this up in closed discussion groups on Facebook, where expatriate dissent to Swedish Covid-19 policy was vented. This private group of concerned citizens followed foreign developments and informed the media outside the country of the Swedish events. While national Covid-19 policies were considered a success in Sweden, the death toll was particularly high among the groups with migrant backgrounds. The critics of these policies were labelled enemies of the state. We situate our analysis in the tradition of normative behaviour in Sweden, where claims of democracy and national superiority intertwine as the dominant social imaginary. Our case study unveils the limits of policy critique in a (seemingly) democratic system. It reveals how the government-commissioned opinion polls were called off at crucial times when its popularity was shrinking. Democratic backsliding during the Covid-19 pandemic takes place globally, as the pandemic control is claimed in top-down visions and contested by minority voices. We highlight that liberal democracies come in diverse shapes. Our paper critically examines the regional focus on democratic backsliding, demonstrating how democratic governance and opinion voicing are much more complex in practice than in idealised textbook cases (such as Sweden). This paper demonstrates the fragility and unevenness of democracy in face of diverse social groups and minorities, through the particular case of Sweden. As democracy is an evolving ethos rather than a mere set of prerequisites, the pandemic crisis puts it into a test.